So, I am thinking of creating a website that does nothing but track the prices of the Conflagrant mats on all the servers? Would anyone pay a small subscription to see this data?
No, I would never pay for that info. It would be useful data to show who the resellers/cornerers are on each server though.
I would suggest that such a site would have an unconvincing business model. Nexflix costs relatively little, and spend 8bn usd on original content, plus what they spent on buying rights... your value add is that people can go to your service instead of typing bazaar or barter. 99.99 will care about the value of ore on their own server, while not caring about it on other servers... First, I would ask you, why would a user be interested in such a service? Is it to follow fluctuations, and speculate on when to sell? Second, I would point out that demand for ore is capped. At some point in time, the demand for a type of ore will be somewhat exhausted, and over time, farming will be easier. That would indicate that the price of ore will in general trend downwards, and if that holds true, stockpiling ore seems like a bad business... The cost (time if you will) of aggregating the publicly available data is substantial. Based on that, I would say that it would be hard to get an income out of an ore-price-service. If you want to do it, I would suggest that you do it for free as a labour of love, and perhaps ask one of the established sites if they want to host your page.
A website that tracks Krono prices seems like a much better idea (and since i said it first i expect a cut) but i highly doubt that anyone would pay for that since you can usually get a answer in general chat on what the going rate for them is currently. To get someone to pay for that service you would have to add some value that they can't just get for free.
Alot of people are actually willing to load a toon with PP and server transfer buy what they can, and then transfer back. Having a service that shows which server is the best bang for the buck is my value
Not sure any one server would have enough of an item for sale to make that worthwhile though. Have to look at what profit margins would be and the fact you can just pay 14 bucks for a krono or less depending where you get it then sell it for 2 million plus. Would be at least one server transfer assuming you add cash to the second server via selling a krono. Pay for a server transfer or get a krono. Are you going to make more money with your profit margin less cost of the transfer? My guess is no but then again I don't do tradeksills
I've never heard of someone spending $50 on server xfers to buy tradeskill mats... that would be very expensive to do. If you're going to do something like this, and expect people to actually pay for it you'd need to track everything in bazaar.
Nobody is buying my ore. Based on your thread I got all excited - maybe I can affored to operate a merc, but I certanly didn't get rich.
I don't think ore is too rare. Consider it takes 3 pieces of ore to make a bp (each sub combine fail can lose 1 piece of ore). It takes 32 pieces of silk to make a robe (each sub combine fail can lose 8 pieces of silk). Keeping that in mind, silk is not at all more common than ore.
I feel like figuring out how to automate the feed should be done long before figuring out how to display it.
Will the site come with TS Index Funds? Ore Futures? RoS Tradeskill ETF's? S&P 50 for the highest capitalization of 50 traders?
He's got a point, if you're looking for people to help you develop it with criticism and ideas - then you can't exactly expect them to jump through hoops.
Materials are dropping fairly steadily (too much if you ask me), its just going to be a freefall after not much longer. But what do I know....
I am curious how you are calculating these prices? Are you going off of bazaar traders or barters or looking at finished products and using a formula that involves a realistic fail rate while factoring in the cost of the merchant mats to determine the average value of mob drop items (I have a formula saved some place to calculate if its better to sell mats or produce an item and sell it for example)? The problem is at any given time someone can come in and try to sell or buy an item for a ridiculous price which will generate false numbers. The same can be said for trying to calculate a mats worth based on the last calculation. Without knowing each servers economy including the sellers and buyers on the respective server (anyone who has been at it long enough knows who will undercut their trader or raise the prices on barter instead of price matching) and knowing what's in demand I don't see how you can formulate an accurate price for something like this.
