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Black Friday 2020 - $176k in 10 days

The nerves are always high whenever we launch a storewide sale. We know that we generate more revenue, but it's always a question of growth. Ideally, you would want to see growth year over year and the same goes for sales. This year was no different. What was different this year was the pandemic.

I don't want to focus on the pandemic too much, but you have to recognize that it played a role.
By this point, people had been home for a long time. At the beginning of the year, I think people were more optimistic. They had a lot of time on their hands, many still had jobs and so were willing to spend more money. Especially online.
This became the big question, would people still be willing to invest in their education while the prospect of landing a job anytime soon looked slim.

The answer is yes.

We didn't treat this sale all that different than we had in the past. What did change was our involvement on social media. Previously we've been pushing a lot of content to platforms, especially YouTube, during the sale. We backed off a bit this year as it's become pretty taxing to create videos every day.
Another small change was advertising. We haven't had much luck with paid advertising in the past, but during this sale, we decided to buy some ad space on 80.lv. It's a platform frequented by students and people interested in game development. From that, we saw a big uptick in US visitors, a market we've had a hard time getting a foothold on. Going forward, we'll try to pursue paid advertising in short sprints and see if we can't retain some of the momentum we've gained from this sale.

Now for some numbers.
It's always a little strange with numbers from this period because we look at the Black Friday/Cyber Monday days which bleed into December for a few days.
Our sale ran from the 23rd of November until the 2nd of December.
In that 10 day period, we generated $176,000.

One figure I'm very proud of is how much we paid out to our creators. Around $77,000. That's 43% of all the revenue generated. We're constantly seeing this number go up. And more and more of our creators are making real money with us. This is a topic that I'm extremely passionate about. 2021 will the year of the creators. We have a lot of very exciting things scheduled and with the way the world is shaping up it's becoming feasible than ever, to make a living online.
Our highest earning creator during the sale made over $4000 and we had more than 15 creators make over $1000

Let's have a quick look at how that compares to our previous Black Friday sales.
BF 18 - $24k
BF 19 - $117k
BF 20 - $176k

From our sale in 2019 to our sale in 2020 we increased revenue by exactly 50%. That's definitely an increase I'm proud of, but I know we can do better and that's what we'll strive for in 2021.

Our conversion rate during the sale was pretty much in line with what we've seen during past sales, 10.26% of visitors became paying customers. That amounted to a little over 5000 purchases. Not all were individual as some customers bought multiple times.

Despite focusing less on YouTube, we still pushed a lot of content to the rest of our social media platforms. Time and time again I'm reminded why these are key in this day and age.
Our combined social media efforts made up around 20% of all direct sales, that's not taking "stragglers" into account who might see some of our content and return to the platform a few days later to purchase.

All in all, this was a success. Tensions were high as always, you never know what to expect. The problem with previous growth is that you become accustomed to it. You expect it to happen again. I'm becoming more aware of this and try to have realistic expectations.

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