2023 Budget Breakdown: The Fool & Scholar Nitty Gritty (Patreon)

Hey Friends,

It's no secret that 2023 was a difficult year for many podcasters. The "post-COVID bubble burst" saw advertising/sponsorship opportunities dry up and it contributed to many Patreon pages spiraling into decline. This summer we even questioned if our team could make it to the end of the year.  While we have been very fortunate to survive (entirely due to your support here) and to see real growth, we feel that sharing a retrospective of our budget might accomplish multiple goals:

Show you why your support is so important

Help folks in the audio fiction community learn from our mistakes

Give people who are interested in entering the audio fiction space a realistic look at the 'business' of fiction

As the largest scripted (full cast) podcast team on Patreon, we feel very much like one of the ships in Star Trek, exploring a still mostly wild frontier.We do not have a guidebook, and must rely heavily on the data that we create and our own internal moral compasses.

*All numbers are shown as a percentage of total (gross) income for 2023

Income

81.5% from Patreon

12.6% from advertisements

3%  from consulting, freelance work, and direct donations

2.28% from merch sales

0.4% from Youtube

0.2% from our bank (interest)

0.2% from Spotify & Twitch streams

It's worth mentioning that this was our highest income year ever thanks to Realm, who expanded our ability to handle advertising through dynamic ads. Between their sales and freelance work (such as D&D in a Castle) we were able to diversify our income a bit. We also saw an increase in overall income from print-on-demand merch sales (despite seeing a decline in sales) by switching to Streamlabs, who offers quality printing on-demand at a higher percent of each sale going to the creator. It's worth noting that we lost our publishing income for 2023 from the DM'sGuild, and that overall merch sales were down to less than 20% of 2022's sales numbers due to a decline in the sale of digital goods.

Our Patreon income dropped sharply every month until October, when we saw growth for the first time in two years. We've been very fortunate to see continued growth since then, so far.

A nice surprise was the interest money from our bank, and seeing our YouTube grow to be statistically significant.

*All numbers are shown as a percentage of our total budget (paid expenses) for 2023

Costs

20.95% - Advertising

14.67% - Admin Team

13.32% - Audio Team (Sound Design, Editing, Mixing)

13.03% - "Rebuilding Costs" (Office Furniture, Hardware, Gear, etc)

9.51% - Actors

8.84% - Misc. Freelancers (non-artistic) (Mailing Pins)

4.93% - Artists (Visual)

3.79% - Award Submission Fees (w/ applicable expenses)

3.72% - Travel Expenses (live events & conventions)

2.94% - Healthcare

2.51% - Music Fees & Freelancers

1.56% - Software, Hosting, & Licenses

0.23% - Misc. Expenses

2023 was a year of investment. With three new shows releasing in 2023, we were eager to help each show find its audience by setting up a variety of advertisements. We invested in ad swaps on other shows, we made a flood of social media posts, ad purchases, gave away physical flyers (at live events like MCM London Comiccon), and purchased Meta, Google, and YouTube ads. The way advertising works has changed so drastically over the last year, and new emerging opportunities presented themselves. We also met a number of really cool creators through some of our ad swaps.

Our admin team cost is a reflection of hiring a number of (essentially) part time folks to help with emails, social media, physical merch, data management, and mailing pins. We have since consolidated these people into a single full time job. This was a really cool shift. Our audio team is mostly one person - who is now a full time employee, and we hire occasional help with extra projects.

Rebuilding Costs are largely related to us losing everything we had owned in a shipping accident last year. This also includes hardware expenses for our two employees, and the two microphones we sent to regular cast members who cannot reach a recording studio. Kaitlin also got a new computer for the first time in eight years.

It should go without saying to pay and credit your actors, artists, composer, and musicians fairly. For our budget, this number was expected to be higher but multiple actors (and a generous composer) returned most of their payments via donations to us or refused to cash the check. This is not a standard business practice nor is it something we encourage.

Our misc. freelancer entry includes folks we hired to help us with marketing, transcriptions, sensitivity (cultural) consulting, trademark fees, fees to talent agencies, and recording studios. The studios/agents are only about 10% of this, with the rest going to the folks who help us function.

Considering how much we traveled for work in 2023, largely for advertising purposes (D&D in a Castle, Berlin recordings, London Podcast Fest, London Comic Con, Twitchcon Paris), we were surprised how low costs were kept. We are a cheap date, haha. On the inverse, our large expenses for award submissions were partially due to covering multiple submission years in some instances. While awards do not fundamentally change the way we create stories, they're important because they give our team/cast recognition it is otherwise all but impossible to get. Having previously worked with a publicist, we've come to recognize that newspapers and magazines rarely focus on audio fiction outside of "(NAMED ACTOR) REINVENTS AUDIO DRAMA."

Big Picture

We learned a lot during 2023, from being happily surprised to completely devastated. We started the newest story for The White Vault and finished up our only child-friendly show. Our losses for 2023 were partially offset by business savings we had from 2022, but we came away with several tough lessons learned:

We are large enough now that each of us far exceeds 40 hours a week, even with two employees (who are capped at 40 hours/week), but we are still too small to hire additional resources. A mix of good and bad here; love to see the growth, love what we do, sad to see how many hours we've logged at our computers every day.

Advertising in podcasting is complex and wild: Though some ads with significant monetary investment were fully ineffective, we are unsure if we'd still be here without heavy investment in advertising.

We love providing unique benefits to our patrons and supporters, but last year's idea was a fumble. Mailing pins in 2023 was a costly mistake split between admin, freelancers, and misc. expenses.

We're growing! And as such, we consolidated freelance hires into full time jobs, which is better for them, and saves money/time (fewer total hours worked, less training / brand education). We're really happy with our team.

We are always trying to keep up with the landscape of indie internet businesses. We started offering yearly Patreon subscriptions - and we're extremely grateful for our Patron growth for the first time in 2 years!

We are optimistic for a VERY ambitious 2024 release schedule, and look forward to sharing more creative stories with you soon!

From the Fool & the Scholar,

Travis & Kaitlin (& Eezo)