Prosper Monetization Survey

Note: wrote this before the TMC/Fountain War kickstarter was launched.  Personal opinions are complicated, but I have no connection to that project.  Still interested in feedback from fans about Prosper vs Monetization 

Monetization is always a touchy subject, but I try to make efforts open and transparent.  Up to now, EVE Prosper has had all ads turned off wherever possible (blog, YouTube, Twitch), and hosting a Patreon for those who wish to contribute directly.  There is no pay-wall and no subscriber-only content.  The goal is to provide the content as freely as possible, and give those who want to contribute more an avenue to do so.

But the truth is: producing the show is not free.  To get the show to YouTube quickly I use Premiere, and there are costs for hosting and hardware.  In addition to that, I try to compensate direct contributors for contributing to the backbone that makes the show possible: code and hosting.

I am not writing this to shake the tip jar or start an NPR-style guilt drive.  Quality content takes time and energy and some IRL cash, and Prosper is by no means taking food off the table.  I only mean to echo that compensation is a motivator and the more the show supports itself, the more time and energy I can commit to it.

What I do want to talk about is YouTube Red.


I am tempted to enable ads on the YouTube videos because of this service.  On the one hand it feels like leaving free money on the table from Red users.  And on the other it seems like a negligible impact on non-Red viewers because of ad blockers or "regular YouTube experience".  I honestly expect the revenue to be paltry with the current consumption rates on YouTube... but I would like to actually get some hard numbers.

But before I go down that path, I'd like to hear from the community about it.  Do you appreciate/notice the lack of ads?  Do you expect some amount of ads in modern web browsing?  Do you think that this should be a fully altruistic labor of love and it's tasteless to ask for IRL monies?

SURVEY HERE

Also, feel free to put opinions in the comments below.  It will probably be a couple of weeks before any decision one way or the other will be made.

How It's Made: Price Flagging

I owe my partner in crime, Etienne Erquilenne, a huge debt for adding a much needed second pair of hands onto this whole Prosper project.  His IRL expertise is completely invaluable, and has freed me up to accelerate the development schedule measurably.  But, as I've expressed on the blog before, I'm very much a fan of open sourcing.  So let's look under the hood.

Volume Flagging

Volume data was straight forward.  Since they never go negative, and rarely jump by orders of magnitude, it was pretty easy to wrap the values up into a normal-ish histogram.  Below is Tritanium:

1yr of Tritanium Volumes - The Forge

Not perfectly normal, but close enough where we can use percentiles to check the "sigma levels".  

For those who aren't statistics nerds, we can say things about values depending on how far they are deviated from the normal.  +/- 1 deviation (sigma) should be relatively normal behavior.  +/- 2 deviations should be extremely rare.  The further we deviate from the norm linearly, the exponentially fewer values we should see at those levels.

Since volumes are largely well behaved, I used this principle of sigma flagging to highlight extreme outliers to report for the Prosper show.  

Price Flagging

Price values aren't so well behaved, and using the same approach is not going to flag useful data:

Just looking for straight price outliers isn't useful.  The only things that will flag are long rises/declines which represent the extremes of the last year.  We'd like to use the same extremity methodology for prices, but a different approach would be required.

Deviation From a Trend

The inspiration came from the Bollinger Band chart.  Simply, it puts a simple-moving-average trend line and then moving-deviation bars around the chart (red lines on matchstick above).  If we instead characterized the distance from a trend, we'd be able to say things about "this is an extreme deviation".

This is a far more "normal" plot.  Also, Etienne rolled in simple-moving-median to compensate for items that might have outrageously bi-variate behavior because of a paradigm shift due to a patch.

Unfortunately, without some sort of second filter, we're going to flag everything every week, and that's not a useful filter.  So Etienne added a voting scheme and "highest votes" binning technique to properly classify the outcoming flags.

Results So Far

So far, this is my favorite validation that the pull is working as intended:

Here we see a peak last week, and a drastic crash in progress.  Though we would have reviewed the data anyway (fuel is a forced group in the tools), finding it in the expected flagging group is a great sign.

To explain what I see in the first graph: we see a spike in pre-Phoebe stockpiling, then a rapid dump off once the patch hit.  What I also see in the above is an heavy overcorrection in the price, dumping it much lower than really makes sense.  If you were watching this product, this would be a great opportunity to buy hoping for a snap-back.  Especially looking at the bottom RSI chart, closer inspection shows that the product is crossing heavily into "oversold" territory, and is strongly signalling an artificially low price.  Of course, balance these price signals against the volume flags (perhaps slightly anemic) to temper expectations. 

What's going on under the hood is the tool is checking the closing average against the white-dotted moving average line.  Though the moving average will catch up, right now the distance from the trend is WAY out of whack.  Especially since it's voted for "very abnormally low" for 5 days, along with 2-3 votes for "abnormally high", this was going to end up in the charting group regardless.

Great... but

Now I have a new problem... too much good data.  To keep the outlier segment inside 15 minutes, I have to filter the pick list to 15-25 items.  Etienne's new tool flagged 500 items, and the true-positive rate is astounding.  For those looking to get into some powerful market automation, this methodology is extremely powerful and should help boil down opportunities like nothing EVE has seen before.  Though we still lack the means to automate "black swan" events like expansion releases, the flagging methodology is very useful for the active trader.

Also, for all of its power, we're up against a problem where the show format and the goals don't match.  Two of the chief goals of the show is to showcase investment opportunities and general trend information going into the weekend.  Unfortunately, the flags are very good for a very short period.  Many of the flags show high pops during the week, after the action has expired.  So, if the trend isn't cooking on Tues-Weds, the show will miss the opportunity to report it.

Lastly, it's a little hard to use this as a direct day-to-day trading tool because of the way the CREST feeds update.  Rumors are that CCP is going to roll out a "one day" CREST feed to simplify keeping the dbs up to date.  

What's Next?

We have some tasks on the table, but the short term goals are:

1. Bring in destruction data
2. Do inter-hub analysis
3. Build indexes

Things are moving along pretty well.  I expect that zkillboard data will be live by the first week of December, and a few more QOL updates should make the show prep move along easier.  Also, rumors of new CREST feeds should improve the quality of data we're pulling (or make our lives even more difficult).  Regardless, with new hardware coming in at home, the ability to automate more should make things move more smoothly.

EVE Prosper Market Review - EP003

I know I missed the report from last week.  Cramming two shows into one week, plus a new project assignment at work made it hard to get enough time to get pieces out the door.  As always, check the show-notes if you're looking for reading material.  A common piece of feedback I received is how much people want an article style, so enjoy the wall-o-text.

This week's show had the very special guest +Diana Dial from EVEtimecode.com.  With Phoebe release, and the recent record high PLEX prices, and the recent 10-day resub drive, PLEX has been a hot topic.  Though I spoke at pretty decent length about PLEX analysis on the supplemental show with Ashterothi, and wrote a more dedicated blog on the topic, it continues to be a hot topic.

EP003 - Show Stuff

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Phoebe Launched

Phoebe has come, and everything seems to be going well.  There was a bug v feature argument around jump clones clearing capital fatigue timers, which CCP quickly ruled: Bug.  Also, the 10-day trial offers should be expired, which is important (IMO) for those watching the PLEX market.  Lastly, as TitaniumTrout pointed out EMDR feeds don't seem to be working since launch, though as of posting, EVE-Central and EVE-marketdata both seem to be up to date with their data.  Also, be sure to check out the responses to Sugar Kyle's call for data visualization of cyno activity pre-Phoebe.

Source: @Fuzzysteve

developers.eveonline.com launched

I have another blog in the pipeline about this.  Great to see a communication channel dedicated to 3rd party devs.  Also the SSO EULA launched, and it's actually a lot better than expected.  

CSM Minutes Released

I haven't had time to read them.  I hesitate to work the CSM politics into a market show, since most of the nuggets worth using in speculation should be NDA'd out.  

o7 Rhea Announcements

Couldn't tune in live, and hearing a lot of the news second hand.  Biggest pieces being no more medclones (hooray for my 3x >100M SP chars), and a new WH hub called Thera.  The details are still a little sparse, but it will not allow capitals, and will have special static wormholes.  

I have some questions out to CCP FoxFour on whether there will be CREST feeds will be enabled for this special system.  Currently CREST doesn't report industry data for WH systems, and Thera is a bit of an odd point between known/wormhole space.  If I can get automated data feeds from Thera, I can guarantee you it will be part of the regular analysis in the Prosper show.  Though it may take up to 60 days of data to really get the current tools to work.

Special Guest: Diana Lynn of EVEtimecode.com

The show ended up a little bit more commercial than I was originally intending, but I think there is enough good content to leave it as is.  Also, keep tuned for the post show because we talk about some of the other retailer-side stuff behind PLEX.  It should be up on twitch by the weekend.

One of the bolder points brought up in the interview was "why should I support someone who doesn't play the game", and I did like her response in the end.  Diana is a huge support to the community at large, and is incredibly active among those who play the game.  And as she bluntly pointed out, a pretty large number of fanfest/eve vegas attendees are players who have been out of the game for years, but still feel at home among the community.  I can't even fault her about it at this point, as I watch my login time dwindle to zero, instead servicing this show.

The trend that keeps getting reinforced is "there is nothing outstanding happening with PLEX [other than the actual price]".  Sales outside of game continue to be on-trend with yearly swings.  Consumption seems to be also on-trend, not that I can get data to prove/disprove it.  The data flags say the current price is an unstable high, but it continues to chug upward.

I do expect some relief to ease the price back down to ~800M in the nearish future, but so far PLEX has been performing outside my models/expectations.  This may be because of the recent 10-day reactivation drive, or the lack of a decent holiday sale, or just mass hysteria.  I do expect to see a daily-average PLEX in Jita hit 1B ISK by Feb 1st, but that will probably be followed by a long flattening as player numbers wane into the spring.

Special Analysis

I didn't have time to really provide depth on the T3 impacts.  It was announced very close to release that the BOM was being boosted for Electronics/Engineering/Propulsion subsystems.  I included one chart to show the trend, but most every other subsystem followed the same trend:

A large crest right before the patch, and a quick crash.  There are a few parts that are probably still shaking out, but I didn't want to key through 12 extra graphs to show off the same trend over and over.  Be sure to check the chart dump if you want to know more.

The other charts I included this week were from the moon product sphere.  I am still on the fence if I trust my speculation in these markets yet.  The truth is material markets are going to be driven by demand, and I don't have a way to boil down net demand yet.  I've added it to the dev todo to use the blueprint stats to work back a "demand" stat for some of these charts, but it's a pretty low priority versus the other todos.  I included both because the MACD signals seem to indicate a price climb.

Regular Analysis

I usually wouldn't include this in the blog, but the fuel markets seem to be going a little weird right before the Phoebe patch.  If you check the segment in the presented slides, most every fuel spiked, and fuel blocks are lagging the recent spike.  

Again, this probably is temporary due to capital stockpiling.  But it is interesting to see such a drastic rise in such a widely used commodity.  I'd also expect fuel prices to wash out into the T2 moon material supply chain if the prices stay high for over a week.

Prediction Review

50/50 seems to be my prediction rate on outliers.  The one I feel worst about is the Imperial Navy ENAM plot:

I really expected this item to rebound hard after recent doldrums, but I may have underestimated the Amarr FW payout.

Also, I feel a little ill-at-ease about suggesting speculation on moon products, but I believe the partner indicators of increased T2 production and higher isotope prices make them worth watching.  I suggested Nanotransistors and Sylramic Fibers last week, and I'm looking at Hafnium and Caesium this week.

Tool Development Progress

Just some quick notes from behind the scenes.  A corp mate, Etienne Erquilenne, has chipped in some help on the tool development.  This week was helped by his recent change to thread the CREST scraper to get all the hub data in one pass.  He's also currently helping implement a plan we came up with for price flagging using deviation from the simple moving average trends.  His assistance is really catalyzing solutions in the back end.

I also started work on bringing zKillboard data into the report.  Though I think I need two more weeks to get the data localized and charted, it's very nearly over the horizon.  Between these two new feeds, I think we'll get a lot more interesting data as we go into the holidays.  

I still have several todos on the list, chief among them being indexes to help boil down the forced-analysis section.  I am also planning on charting some consumption trends as well, but I don't think those will be delivered until the new year.

Conclusions

I want to extend a huge thank you for all the support the show has had so far.  This week has really proven my previous feelings totally wrong, and I feel like feedback is back on track with expectations.  Also, the help from the community both inside and outside the show has been outstanding!  Continue tuning in, and continue sending your feedback so I can make a better show in the long run.

And shout out to Zero Gravity for the review.  Hope the blog dump is more to your liking ;)

EVE Prosper Market Review - EP001

Went ahead and moved a couple pieces around for this show.  I've removed the moon analysis (because it's dry and really needs to be boiled down into an index or two), and replaced it with a "Prediction Review" section.  Hopefully that makes the show go along a little smoother.  Also, I'm going to try a little bit of editing to try and make the show sound a little better.  Lastly, I finally figured out how to get the youtube/channel_name to work, so feel free to point your friends toward: https://www.youtube.com/user/EVEProsper.

Though the Twitch participation was lower, I was happier about the format of tonight's show.  Shoutouts to One Man Wolfpack and Dirk Macgirk for participating in the chat.

EP001 - Show Stuff

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Invention Changes

Though the specific news is a little old, I wanted to touch on the expected impacts of these changes.  Most of the changes wash out, and will probably end up with net-drop in T2 prices, it probably won't change the T2 production margins much.  So, for producers things should stay mostly-similar.  I still think the full effect of teams hasn't hit the main stream yet, but the best industrialists will be taking those opportunities to maximize returns.

The T3 changes are far more interesting, because it should no longer be a dice-roll, but instead be deliberate.  This should kick a lot of the demand for reverse engineerables in the teeth, and margins will probably narrow... though I expect the net to be positive, since there should be a lot less waste going on.

SOV EHP Changes

Though I'm not particularly interested in the specific HP/resist changes, I think this will be interesting in the short term after Phoebe.  To keep it simple: if the HP changes lead to a lot of Sov shuffling, high-end PI producers should be cheering

3rd Party Developer Blog

CCP is testing the waters on a blog for tracking 3rd party stuff like CREST/API updates.  I love the interface, and I'd love to see the feed move to full syndication.  In a similar vein, there were some great talks at EVE Vegas for/from player-devs and I'll be talking about them next week.

But, this is required watching IMO:

Multi-Sell

Hallelujah!  Saving stupid clicking and improving quality of life for trade players.  Though I don't expect a bunch of direct impacts on any particular item, I do expect the volume of trade to go up.  This might be bad news for some margins, but it might also make the buy/sell market more interesting.  Either way, this is a great piece of news, and I'm just excited to get it.

Outlier Report

Make sure to check the presented slides.  The few I'd like to point out, I'm going to call the "Black Legion Meta effect".

Though I am still lacking a good way to display the destruction data, it's interesting to see my filters actually work to fetch up mass trends.

Prediction Review

As a matter of record, I'd like to highlight hits and misses.  The hopes are to make the "hits" list longer and the "misses" list shorter.

First, a hit I was surprised about: Imperial Navy Acolyte

Though I was expecting it to be mostly level or keep doing the waffling thing it has been doing, it did seem to crest over the weekend justifying itself as a "outlier worth watching"

Second, a miss that I was also surprised about: Morphite

I had written off Morphite as "in a tailspin", but I was completely wrong.  The low looks now, in retrospect, as an overcorrection.  I'm hoping I can use this as a test case for notes going forward.  Also, it will be a good indicator of T2 trends, and might become more volatile as we go into the generally high-traffic period of the year.

EVE Prosper Market Review - EP000

Not sure yet how I'll be parsing out these show notes to automate it onto the blog here, but see below my quick notes for the Cliff's Notes.

This first show went much better than I expected.  I had worried that I'd be hard-pressed to make my 1-hr mark, instead being wildly over and droning on and on.  Thankfully, I hit ~50mins, which leaves me a lot of space to boil down some analysis and add more topics down the line.

Also, I'd like to keep the project as open source as possible.  Unfortunately, some of the setup I've chosen so far are not really user-friendly (yet).  You can grab my scripts and do your own analysis (or cut me out entirely), but it's as-is, and will require a little hacking to get going.  https://github.com/lockefox/EVE_MarketAnalyzer

EP000 - Show Stuff:

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Phoebe Jump Changes

Jump ranges are being reduced, and fatigue is being introduced.  Though the initial proposal was pretty bold, especially with the exponential nature of the fatigue numbers, a lot of the riskier features were beaten back to a far more reasonable, but tough change.

Personally, my corp and I have had our eyes on the Jump Freighter changes, since combat logistics are a particular specialty of ours.  Though the 5ly original plan was going to be somewhat painful, putting our HQ out of range of both Jita and Dodixie, the new 10ly jump limit means we can keep our established supply lines running.  Also my original predictions about capital/POS fuel getting horded probably won't come true.

The best illustration of the changes is still this gem from /r/eve:

Uedama Freighter Ganking

"As an act of protest", the CFC and CODE have teamed up to gank freighters in Uedama.  Though I think the excuse is thinly veiled, and it's traditionally a time of year that CFC comes to HS to cause drama, it is having effects on the EVE economy.  Chiefly, Red Frog is raising its rates in general, and adding an additional fee for transport through Uedama.  Details can be found in their mini press release.

Though the general rate hike should be regarded like IRL postage (The cost of stamps will rise ever higher), I think the Uedama fee is interesting.  If this does wash out into any sizable effect, I expect there to be pent up supply coming from Gallente space once the ganks subside.  Though I doubt the rubber-banding will be as drastic as we've seen post Burn-Jita events.

Sleeper Research Event

I was just going to make a couple of bullet points about the spike in demand for "blue loot" (thanks Ravas for that).  Instead, after recording Hydrostatic Podcast with guest Ravas, I learned about a far more interesting outcome.

In his piece "They're Lying to You", Ravas outlines a lot of the player-driven WH lore generated since the space was released.  As an act of defiance, to try and revitalize an old player-dev partnership project, the WH community is rallying around Gillome Renard to stick it to the empires.  If I get my hands on any of the designated loot for this event, I will definitely be throwing it Gillome's way!

Outlier Report

Tonight, I'm going to point readers to the show/notes for more information about specific outlier reporting.  I should dedicate this section on the blog to more texty analysis, but I am running out of time to publish this post.  Instead, I'll give you some info about HOW I generated this episode's outlier report, and the methodology I'll be using going forward.

To automate finding interesting things, I went ahead and filtered items based on weekly sales volume.  My script pulls each item, profiles the distribution of daily sales, and then saves off some information, assuming it fits a normal distribution curve.  Continuing with that assumption, I then use "sigmas" to pick out specific percentile levels.  If the weekly average volume for an item crosses one of those percentile levels, it flags for further analysis.  

I know that it would be better to look at some sort of price-based flagging, but I don't have a great methodology for that yet.  Long bouts of growth or decline will break the method I'm using today.  I will probably look to leverage more of the methods enabled by Quantmod, but we'll start with volumes today, and work on better methods over time.

Conclusions

I am reasonably pleased by this first test show.  The tools work well to enable reasonably quick prep, and general interest seems high.  We'll see over the next week how the twitch/youtube subscriptions/hits go, but I'm pretty excited.  Also, I will be trying my best not to be all emo about not being able to make it to EVE Vegas.