Penny Arcade sells short - part 2

In the previous installment I talked about the misbegotten pitch video for Penny Arcade's Kickstarter campaign.  The most bizarre thing about this video was the way it spent by far the majority of its time essentially harping on how much it costs to run Penny Arcade.  Intentionally or not this is what got communicated by the protracted "we hate our employees" sequence.  The humor fell flat and in the end the message was hugely counterproductive: gosh, that price tag seems insanely large doesn't it?

I don't think any sufficient effort went into really figuring out what was being sold.  Looking back at the pitch as summarized in the video - "no ads... a direct relationship with the reader... a return to a glorious golden age" - what is being sold is completely ideological.  Again I have to go back to that question - what made the period when the comic was purely donation-funded a "golden age?"  They don't have a non-ideological answer to that ("people don't like advertising almost as a general rule" is what they do come up with).  On the Kickstarter page after the video a couple of screenshots are offered. These are the money shots of this whole pitch, the new world order if the plan succeeds, and I suspect this is really where the issue gets to be the perspective of inside baseball versus the perspective of the average viewer.  I just sat for a couple minutes staring at those pictures, flipping between the two example images and the site as it exists now.  I bet to the people who construct this site, who pore over it day after day as the primary offering and money-generator of the whole business, the differences are huge.  They aren't to me.  They are barely noticeable.

Notice how the primary goal (the one that actually triggers "success" of the project) is described: "Leaderboard on the homepage removed".  The use of an industry term (leaderboard) that isn't in particularly common coinage is telling.  Again, from the inside this is no doubt a huge change - writing off what is certainly one of the single most valuable pieces of real estate on the website.  But to regular people "remove the leaderboard ad" doesn't mean anything, really, and visually it looks 95% the same.  $250K for one little incremental change? Another $275K for a second little incremental change?  The fact is I am naturally sympathetic to this pitch - I like the product, I respect the people who make it, and I believe in the ideology behind it.  Even so at this point my eyes are starting to roll at this.  You've got a successful business and it's clear you've both done pretty well by it.  Now I'm supposed to dig into my spavined wallet so that you can make your front page more "pure?"

(I suspect there may be a bit of backlash to come from people who didn't bother to read the FAQs as well, namely the full explanation of the primary goal:

The leaderboard is the long, flat ad at the top of the page. Reaching $250k removes the leaderboard on the homepage. $525k gets rid of both ads on the homepage. Reaching $999,999 gets the ads removed on the rest of the PA pages, including the comic page. 

It wasn't totally clear to me until I read it that only hitting the million dollar goal would actually get ads off the comic page - what some might reasonably consider the actual payload of a daily visit to the site.  I wonder how clear it is to the general supporter).

I think it's likely that the lion's share of the failure of the project is there in a nutshell: an overly ideological justification for a goal that just doesn't make much of a real impact.  They're frankly lucky they scraped half a million out of general goodwill and deep-pocketed patrons with a yen to play foosball in Seattle or whatever the hell.

I should add a couple of acknowledgments to this assessment.  The first is that an acknowledged irony with people's indifference to the removal of PA's front page ads is that they've done an exceptionally good job with advertising.  The look of the ads they display are almost always really well integrated visually with the site, and their principal of not taking ads for games they don't support and not pulling any editorial punches for advertisers is justly renowned.  I appreciate this as an obstacle but its one they should have had a plan to overcome in advance.  Like many aspects of this Kickstarter it feels to me like it was rushed and that they would have done well to have done some preliminary work previewing and presenting it and getting feedback to hone it before launch.

The second issues is that my summary - an ideological pitch for an unimpressive change - is pretty unfair as it ignores a lot of other justifications and incentives offered for the campaign - some debuted with the project, some added as it went along.  This is absolutely true - fully parsed and considered as a whole the project is a whole lot more exciting.  But here is the thing - you have to scroll down five pages to get to that meat.  There is literally nothing about it in the pitch video and just a sentence about it int the project description prior to the stretch goals board.  This is the definition of burying the lede.

But I'm anticipating myself now.  In the next installment I'll get into how I think the mechanics of how this campaign was constructed ended up amplifying the difficulties of the pitch rather than overcoming them.  In the fourth and final chapter I'll think about some negative consequences I think carrying the partly-successful project through will incur.  Finally I'll talk about how I think they could actually make this pitch work if there's a next time - I'm sure Robert Khoo will be on the edge of his seat waiting for me to drop the wisdom.