Hi guys,
I'm Jordan a 17 year old from Ireland. I'm still in school I have a year and a half left. I have been playing the game Minecraft for a few years now and I have built up a network of about 200-300 other players. In November 2013 I hosted a gaming server and ran a small website and forums for players of the game to communicate on. I was working on this with another person from England, he maintained the server and I maintained the website and forums. We sold rare items within our gaming server for money and we each made about 2000$ each in the space of a month as we split the profits in half. At the beginning of December the other person wanted to take two months off to focus on exams and study as he had tests coming up in mid-january. He wanted me to continue working the entire business by myself while he retained his share of the profits. I disagreed with this and we went our seperate ways. The website and gaming server were subsequently sold for 500$ as I didn't know how manage the technicalities of the gaming server. At this time I was pretty annoyed as all this hard work had paid off but we hadn't managed to build a lasting business.
Fastforward to now, I spent a month learning how to run a gaming server and continued building my network. About a month ago I opened a new gaming server along with a website and forums. While I do have an American guy running the technicalities of the server I do know how to do them myself but they consume plenty of time which I wish to spend on more valuable tasks. I have also completely automated the payment process and linked the website with the gaming server so when somebody purchases from the website the items are automatically deposited onto their gaming account this was the most time consuming part of the previous business as I spent hours online manually transfering items. I have also appointed a number of key players to manage other players on the server and enforce rules, again I have automated the tedious stuff like automatically filtering explicit language and blocking players from destroying each others buildings.
I'm starting this thread as a way to document my progress and also to recieve feedback from other people of a similar mindset. So far I have only made 30$ from two sales and I have 130 people registered on the website/forums. I attribute these low profits to that fact that I haven't been selling perks which influence gameplay to much as I felt it took away from the players that couldn't afford to pay resulting in a lower player count on my server, however I am in the middle of reevaluating this as MJ says you need to create value to get people to part with their money and maybe people don't see the current perks as valuable. Other changes this time around include the fact that I own 100% of the business this time and the others helping me are just promoted players and don't have to be paid. I have also designed a very efficient looking and working website you can check it out at www.ancientmc.com I would like people to provide feedback.
My first Goal is to make 100$ a week from my website and to expand on this goal once it has been reached.
I have recieved 1800 hits on the website over the last 25 days and most evenings we have about 20 players on the server. I'm also looking for other ways to promote and advertise my website, at the moment I have threads running on popular gaming forums/ranking lists. I also have a youtube video taken within the server and soon I will be streaming the server through Twitch.tv
Many of you will wonder why I decided to post how much I made and the idea. The answer is that I put in over a years work unpaid I didn't realise it at the time because it was just gaming to me also there is already plenty of competition for the 11 million+ minecraft players so I feel this thread will be more beneficial than destructive to me.
Expenses:
Website - 7.99$ a month
Hosting - 22.49$ a month
Income:
We have 5 perk packages running at 10$, 20$, 30$, 50$ and 75$ our target audience is 11+ million Minecraft players.
I'm Jordan a 17 year old from Ireland. I'm still in school I have a year and a half left. I have been playing the game Minecraft for a few years now and I have built up a network of about 200-300 other players. In November 2013 I hosted a gaming server and ran a small website and forums for players of the game to communicate on. I was working on this with another person from England, he maintained the server and I maintained the website and forums. We sold rare items within our gaming server for money and we each made about 2000$ each in the space of a month as we split the profits in half. At the beginning of December the other person wanted to take two months off to focus on exams and study as he had tests coming up in mid-january. He wanted me to continue working the entire business by myself while he retained his share of the profits. I disagreed with this and we went our seperate ways. The website and gaming server were subsequently sold for 500$ as I didn't know how manage the technicalities of the gaming server. At this time I was pretty annoyed as all this hard work had paid off but we hadn't managed to build a lasting business.
Fastforward to now, I spent a month learning how to run a gaming server and continued building my network. About a month ago I opened a new gaming server along with a website and forums. While I do have an American guy running the technicalities of the server I do know how to do them myself but they consume plenty of time which I wish to spend on more valuable tasks. I have also completely automated the payment process and linked the website with the gaming server so when somebody purchases from the website the items are automatically deposited onto their gaming account this was the most time consuming part of the previous business as I spent hours online manually transfering items. I have also appointed a number of key players to manage other players on the server and enforce rules, again I have automated the tedious stuff like automatically filtering explicit language and blocking players from destroying each others buildings.
I'm starting this thread as a way to document my progress and also to recieve feedback from other people of a similar mindset. So far I have only made 30$ from two sales and I have 130 people registered on the website/forums. I attribute these low profits to that fact that I haven't been selling perks which influence gameplay to much as I felt it took away from the players that couldn't afford to pay resulting in a lower player count on my server, however I am in the middle of reevaluating this as MJ says you need to create value to get people to part with their money and maybe people don't see the current perks as valuable. Other changes this time around include the fact that I own 100% of the business this time and the others helping me are just promoted players and don't have to be paid. I have also designed a very efficient looking and working website you can check it out at www.ancientmc.com I would like people to provide feedback.
My first Goal is to make 100$ a week from my website and to expand on this goal once it has been reached.
I have recieved 1800 hits on the website over the last 25 days and most evenings we have about 20 players on the server. I'm also looking for other ways to promote and advertise my website, at the moment I have threads running on popular gaming forums/ranking lists. I also have a youtube video taken within the server and soon I will be streaming the server through Twitch.tv
Many of you will wonder why I decided to post how much I made and the idea. The answer is that I put in over a years work unpaid I didn't realise it at the time because it was just gaming to me also there is already plenty of competition for the 11 million+ minecraft players so I feel this thread will be more beneficial than destructive to me.
Expenses:
Website - 7.99$ a month
Hosting - 22.49$ a month
Income:
We have 5 perk packages running at 10$, 20$, 30$, 50$ and 75$ our target audience is 11+ million Minecraft players.
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