Forum:Board Meeting - 2023-04-15

Forums: Index > Board Meeting - 2023-04-15

Our first board meeting of 2023 took place on 15 April over Discord Voice Chat. All 9 board members were in attendance, as well as several non-members who joined for the non-confidential portion of the meeting.

Meeting notes

Board roles

Company roles are defined at https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Board#Company_roles The following roles are established by unanimous agreement of the members in attendance.

• Chairperson - BigDiesel2m
• Minute taker - Riblet15
• Bookkeeper - BigDiesel2m
• Treasurer - CraftyElk
• RS wiki liaison - BlackHawk
• OSRS wiki liaison - BigDiesel2m
• pt-BR wiki liaison - Toktom

Retrospective

RSW

• 7 new wikian titles given out
• Disabled anonymous page creation (temporarily) due to spam attack.
• Voice of Seren relies on a Twitter API which is updating its pricing model (would be 100s of dollars/month for the Read API). Starting to work closer with Jagex to get better API access.
• Solved randomness equations for Vis Wax, Travelling merchant, Penguins, Yak trak. Big calculator wins for community use.

OSW

• Fairly successful community outreach event regarding Giant Dwarf. Likely the most successful event ever (100s of people involved).
• Shayani reaching endgame of CSS variables for darkmode. Gives more flexibility to add more themes.

PT-BR

• No major developments.
• Discussion about adding PT-BR to toplinks of other wikis.
• Want to re-open the Forums on PT-BR. May need some technical assistance.

Tech updates

• GKE standard migration
  • Still in progress.
• Fixed session loss issue that has been affecting editors for 4 years (Loading a page on a different wiki after starting an edit on another).
• Redis cache issues caused by downloading large exports of articles.
  • Root caused the issue to cache configuration, fix coming soon.
• Wikisync data storage restructured to be more efficient. Future potential cost is decreased.

Business update

Note: The business update is primarily written by Cook and he should be assumed to be the speaker for any first-person statements. For additional questions please post in the discussion below or contact Cook on discord.

• Significant changes in the last 3 months - we have been running ads since February
• Engaged a law firm (Golenbock Eiseman) for US operations
• Weird Gloop UK now owns a US subsidiary (Weird Gloop USA, Inc. - Delaware C Corp)
• Opened a US bank account with Wells Fargo
• Jayden is officially employed at WG UK as of this month: beginning work on DPS calculator, long overdue tech cleanup

Advertising revenue

• We were pulling in about $5k a week with Nitropay with only the footer OR sidebar unit
• Combined with Patreon ($20k/yr) + Jagex net, this is easily enough for us to employ the two people we wanted to, without very intrusive advertising
• Not happy with the amount of malvertising redirects we faced in the first month with Nitropay
• Led us to look for different ad partners: currently testing Playwire
• Not running in EU/UK because we are unhappy with Playwire's default consent screen
• Jury's still out on revenue due to ramp-up, but the general consensus from other publishers/wikis is that Playwire often pays a bit better
• Bummer: lost out on ~10 days of revenue in April due to switching providers - in retrospect we could have been more careful about this
• Countries breakdown/adblock
• Happy to answer other questions about ad revenue here
• Is there a world where we would prefer direct sponsorships (think more YouTube-y, hardware/other games) instead of programmatic JS ads?

Cash flow

• Jagex came through and pre-paid entire year 2023, gives us wiggle room (props to Mod Bolton)
• ~$60k in the bank (don't read this as Jagex's annual, it's not)
• ~$6k in Patreon has been collected ($2k/month, going slightly up month-over-month)
• $3k coming mid April, $18k coming mid May (NET45 payment terms for Nitropay, NET60 for Playwire)
• Non-labor expenses currently $2400/month
• Upshot: we have at least 6 months of burn even if all revenue dries up, I have probably put my last dollar in(!)

Future work

• Still determining best way long-term to move money between US and UK entities
• Should the US entity be the one directly receiving USD (Patreon, ad revenue)?
• Tax implications of dividends, transfer pricing, etc
• Engaging a UK accountant this Monday who specializes in this type of international bridging
• Hammering out employment details with Kitty, now that we have a US sub

Big picture

• Ads roll-out has been:
  • way better than expected in terms of sentiment
  • about as expected in terms of revenue, maybe slightly below (mostly due to AdBlock)
  • slightly worse than expected in terms of stress associated with serving bad ads
• By end of April, both sysadmins will be employed
• There is enough money to go around that we may consider some discretionary spending (merch, "techfests", etc)
• Elephant in the room: there will likely be enough money for a third (or perhaps even fourth) WG employee - not a lot of room to ratchet down ads between (say) $150k-$300k range, short of turning off non-US
• What does the community want?
• Selfishly, I would eventually like to step away from day-to-day operations and I would feel more comfortable if we hired someone to do most of my role

Discussion

Thanks to the community members who joined and to those who asked questions. Feel free to leave any feedback you have for the board here or in Discord at any time. Riblet15 (talk) 05:16, 1 May 2023 (UTC)