Sunday, June 29, 2014

For the Record: May 2014 Glyph Sales



228k gold in glyph sales! A new record for the enterprise, selling almost double the number of glyphs than last month.

Stats:
  • Total Glyph Sales: 228997g
  • Total Glyphs Sold: 2935
  • Average Price: 78g02s
May was a huge month! I could barely keep up with restocking glyphs (by which I mean I didn't (making 1708 glyphs during the month). Herb prices have been rising, and I'm back up to happily paying 1g per herb.

Now that I've made a stupendous amount of gold selling glyphs, rather than try and top that in June, I decided on a new experiment. I've dabbled in analysing the relationship between when glyphs are posted and when they are sold, but there are some severe limitations just due to a sensible and efficient posting schedule. Posting once or twice per day, two of each profitable glyph leads to the following problems. Firstly, posting two of each glyph means I can sell out within minutes. It doesn't allow for recording the third, fourth and fifth sale before I'm undercut to oblivion. Posting for 48 hours, and reposting again inside that window doesn't allow me to see just how few glyphs are sold at the 46th hour mark.

So my experiment for June will be conducted as follows. Post eight of each glyph for 48 hours, and only reposting after they have all expired. Yes, I'll make a LOT less gold... but I will be able to produce a pretty sexy graph depicting just how quickly glyph sales drop off after posting.

4 comments:

  1. How much time do you think you spend actively at your computer while bringing in that kind of gold?

    Just curious!

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    Replies
    1. That is an excellent question! One of my huge pet peeves for gold blogers is the sloppy use of 'You can make XYZ gold per hour!' I like to see some rigour applied when people use numbers.

      A good example is you can get blah gold per hour from running this dungeon. What they mean to say is, I predict that you can obtain, on average, this value of gold and items per hour. I'm yet to see a blogger add up the time it takes to actually offload that gear, take into account failed auctions (and therefore the AH cut) and just how long it takes to sell some of those old, potentially useful transmog items. It makes me cringe.

      It is probably worth mentioning my wife's pet peeve too. XYZ gold per hour suggests that it is repeatable. Bloggers rarely point out how often it is viable to run their scheme before you hit severe diminishing returns. Back to the example of old content. Sure, that cloth will always sell... but until you've sold all those epics, getting more is just costing you inventory space.

      That is my long winded way of saying, I have absolutely NO idea, but I 'feel' like it is efficient.

      So, perhaps for July, I'll add another experiment to see how much time it takes to go through the glyph making and selling process. Or maybe I won't, because that seems like an awful lot of work ;) Also, now that I'm into my experiment of only posting once every ~52 hours (on average) it changes the nature of my schedule (and time commitment quite a bit.

      The most complex part is that glyph selling is a bulk business. For May, I couldn't keep up with making glyphs... so even if I logged my active time with the glyph business in May, the time I spent in May is completely skewed, since I'm selling glyphs that were already made in previous months, and not crafting enough to replace them all.

      Another issue is that when I buy herbs, some of them are for potions / flasks etc. and some of them get milled. How do you allocate the time? (I generally purchase at least once per day with my morning coffee).

      Lastly, what constitutes 'actively at your computer'? You can AFK collect your mail without breaking the terms of service. However, when you mill or craft it requires one key press for each action. So I have a little warcraft window open in the bottom right hand side of my TV, and while we're watching something entertaining I'll be pressing the 'mill this' keybind over and over again. Multitasking! Is that really active? On the other hand, if I hit, 'post my glyphs' and then alt-tab to twitter while it scans 100 pages of the auction house... I'm not actively selling glyphs... but I'm not exactly using that time to do something productive either.

      So I'll give it some thought and see if I can some up with some numbers for this month.

      P.S. Bonus caveat time! One of the reasons my glyph business is so profitable is because I have the vast majority of glyphs learned. If I was to suggest someone new to inscription sell glyphs because it's an awesome way to make gold (it is!) I wouldn't shy away from describing just how long it takes to learn them all! That is an investment a lot of people take for granted.

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    2. It's always interesting to benchmark your own activities against someone else's data.

      At the moment I post once per day on four characters at a less-than-ideal time due to playing on a US server from the UK. I focus on buckles, old world gem cuts, lots of flasks and enchants. I also have two transmuters who I make living steel with to make the buckles a bit more profitable.

      Depending on what i'm doing I probably take about 20 minutes to get it all done and dusted including mailboxing, crafting, getting mats and cancel/reposting.

      This gets me an average of around 4k per day profit, requires no thought on my part and minimal clicks through the use of addons like TSM.

      I dabbled in glyphs a few expansions back and the sheer volume of space, posting and reposting required was back-breaking!

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  2. Total rubbish. 200k monthly in glyphs, yeah dude, that's totally plausible. Like it's 2012 now and MoP just went live.
    I was selling glyphs myself on busy high pop EU server for all June (and May), every single day. Most profit i'd get was ~3k /day and that with undercutting EVERY SINGLE HOUR with the help of tsm plugins. If you don't undercut every hour you're out of business and you won't sell a single glyph these days - simple as that. On usual day it was only about 1.5k, because of low demand and severe undercutting where glyphs which just yesterday were selling for 100-150g are now being posted for 10g each.
    200k that's close to cumulative monthly sales on all glyphs for entire server. Stop bullshitting people, dude.
    It's pretty convincing articles if you're don't know about real situation at the moment. Those who know just shaking they heads in disbelief when they reading this nonsense.

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