Hey everyone, I'm going to do something I'd otherwise be against doing, and that is give everyone a thorough insight into avatar communities with a focus on menewsha and how things are going for us.
Expenses per month
I'm not going to state exactly what every individual gets paid (because you just don't do that), but here a grouped run-down:
Designer (full time) + Artist (part time) + AA's - $2,200
Pixel Artists (contract) - Ranging from $500 to $2,500
Flash Designer (full time#) + Coder (Full time) - $3,100
Server hosting - $600
Me (coding, managing, direction) - FREE
Total monthly expenses - $6,400 up to $8,400
Then we have advertising which can be anywhere from nothing to $2,000 per month, which means some times the site spends over $10,000 per month on expenses. We don't even hire our coder and flash designer from the US because we're forced to outsource to get the costs down.
Revenue per month
Now here is the revenue, note that there are zero costs removed from this apart from transaction processing fees:
This means that last month (because we are in-between coders) it COST me $4,614 to run this site. In other words, I go to work every day, work my ass off, get a pay check, then give a large chunk of my pay check to other people to keep this site running. I DO NOT claim menewsha against tax, I DO NOT take sponsored funding, and there IS NOT some huge corporation behind this site - just little ol' me supporting the difference between what the site makes and what it costs. But let me make this clear, I do not blame any of you for this, but I'll explain that further later. Yes, to put it in plain text,
I lose over $50,000 per year running this site.
Children of Gaia
It is well known that Zantarni, Roliana and Kinsaki all have declining numbers of sales. There is proof of this in the numbers that were publicized from Roliana's sale. We also have reason to believe Solia is not doing too well based on post stalking, which means all of the second tier sites from Gaia are ALL having difficulties. The even smaller sites still may be doing okay with their minimal expenses, but the future is looking pretty bleak. You might ask why I refer to this as the children of Gaia - well lets face it, all of the sites I just mentioned were started by people who wanted their own little version of Gaia. Most of our users have had a Gaia account, and when a new user comes here most of the time they were make a parallel between the two. So lets not beat around the bush, we are spawns of Gaia, and we're failing, which means Gaia is more than likely suffering too, or is soon going to be.
Why are we failing?
Gaia was founded in 2003, at the height of a worldwide boom in anime. At the time they were heavily focused on anime hype and they created a pretty interesting situation where boys - who would otherwise think dress up was girly - started playing virtual dress up. This meant that unlike traditional dress up sites Gaia catered to males almost as much as females, and unsurprisingly, along with it's anime focus, became very, very popular. Gaia in it's growth made a lot of mistakes which upset a lot of it's users, which resulted a vast amount of the older users leaving. These users found homes in the children sites of Gaia, all of which vowed to never make the same mistakes. It's now 2010, a full seven years after Gaia's founding, and the Gaia deserters of the beginning are now mostly in their twenties, some with kids, married, or just generally not interested in the same things anymore. These people are what the child sites of Gaia rely on for donations to keep running, but they are growing up.
There are 82,927 members of this site right now, of which 1,605 have donated. This means for every one person we get contributing to the site, we have 51 people who never do. The ability for the site to continue to exist is quite literally resting on the donations of only a few - but those few are growing up and have other things they would prefer to spend their money on or do. We can't blame anyone for growing up, and I do not want to blame any of you who don't spend anything.
The problem here is that we are servicing a niche which doesn't carry the weight it used to. I'd put money on the fact Gaia users do not spend half the amount of months on the site as they used to because the niche they are serving no longer has the hype it used to. As you can see from here
Google Trends: draw anime the amount of people interested in the creative side of anime has decreased from the days of Gaia's founding.
I could go on about different theories here, but the end facts are the same:
1) Sites spawned from Gaia are failing
2) People are donating less, and not just because of the economy
3) The niche we serve does not have the same hype is used to
4) If we do not evolve the niche we will die
