 Wow Okay, so thank you guys for coming I got here a little bit late, so I haven't had the chance to meet very many of you So I appreciate it My name is Jonathan Lampell and I work for a CG cookie as a blender instructor and I'm also on the blender markets team So this presentation we're gonna be taking a look at the blender market specifically So if you're not familiar with what that is, it's the first online marketplace or the only online marketplace That's exclusively for blender products. So that's models Materials textures add-ons anything that you can use with blender you can sell through the market so the the market started in July of 2014 and it started out as as a collaboration with Jonathan Williamson from CG cookie And Matthew Muldoon from blend swap who has since joined CG cookie and they've been working on the market for a little over two years now so in this talk I'm gonna go over, you know Why we started it in the first place and where we are today and what we think about going forward So when we first launched the market, we definitely got a lot of good positive feedback but of course there was the obligatory Vocal minority that made sure that we knew that we were selling our souls for profit and We're harming the blender community by by injecting commercialism into the blender ecosystem But of course we saw things a little bit differently. We hoped that by creating a commercial side to the Blender community that everybody was able to participate in we hoped to be able to increase the quality of both free and paid add-ons and assets So the reason CG cookie exists is to enable independent artists to succeed and also to be a positive force in the community So we're hoping that the blender market is an extension of those goals so we wanted to build an ecosystem that rewarded creators for creating products for quality over quantity and we also wanted a place for artists that they could go to and get all of the tools and the Assets that they needed to make quality artwork faster So that was a dream, but we didn't really have any idea if it would take off or or whether it would work So selling models and textures from a technical standpoint turned out to be relatively easy The challenging thing came in when it came to selling add-ons with GPL So if you're not quite familiar any add-on that's in Blender also has to share the same license So it has to be open source and GPL And so if somebody hasn't developed for Blender before They can be a little bit skeptical of course on you know, why should I create something specifically for Blender when by definition? Other people can you know after they purchase it shared out with other people who haven't purchased it or also? You know build on top of it themselves and sell it as their own product and and kind of you know There's a potential for for being ripped off that way. So it goes against a little bit of the Traditional business business way of working So before we tried to go out and convince other people to do it We decided that we had to do it ourselves So this came in the form of Ritopo flow that was created by Jonathan Williamson and Patrick Crawford and John Denning And so the Ritopo flow is an add-on that makes Ritopology much much easier But that did really well so far it sold over a hundred thousand dollars Since it since it came out and that's particularly interesting given the fact that you can find it on GitHub for free And so the reason it's on GitHub is we wanted to make sure that we were in the spirit of Open and sharing communication with our users You know, we wanted people to be able to learn from the code and be able to dig through it themselves and learn things from it And since this was one of the first large-scale paid add-ons that you know is a pretty hefty price We wanted to make sure that we introduced it in a way that was you know open and still in the spirit of sharing So of course putting things on GitHub has had positive and negative results. So First thing it's been it's been great for communication between us and our customers and it's been great for better bug reports And so development has been able to go along much faster because of that Now of course the obvious downside is we don't know how much money we've actually lost from that We have no way to you know calculate how many people have downloaded it and not paid us for our work. So that's definitely a downside but What's definitely clear is that it's not helpful to be Too precious about your work There's nothing really good that comes out of putting too many walls between you and your customers. It stifles long-term growth So One thing that we we talk about a lot at CG cookie on our retreats and stuff is how much is too much to give away for free Because we have to find that balance because of course if we're not making money Then we're not around to give things out to other people for free So it's kind of a cycle and we're always trying to find exactly where that balance point is But of course not everybody is in our position when it comes to selling things with GPL for example Allogorithmic the company that makes substance substance designer and substance painter they have a really cool plug-in for Maya and they have a really cool plug-in for unity and They kind of hit a roadblock when it came to Blunder because of the GPL license and in their case the way that the Plug-in works for unity is you can take your procedural material from substance designer and Take that file go right into unity and tweak all of the parameters inside the game engine directly So this is really fantastic if any of you views it, you know how awesome it is But the reason it works the way it does is because it has some of the source code from substance designer So in order to you know make that with Blender They'd have to open source, you know that part of substance designer, which is a really big deal And that not something that they're willing to do But that's a really specific instance, and you know it's likely not something that's going to happen to independent creators an example of a company that has created a commercial product with Blunder Communicating very well is Pixar and their render man render engine. I'm sure some of you are familiar with so Brian savory has done a great job of creating that add-on and the way that it works and avoids any issues with GPL is Actually, if you download render man for Maya and have Blender the add-on just talks between the two apps and creates the UI for Blender and so none of the source code from render man is actually in there the add-on is just for communicating between the two apps So if you are definitely Concerned about releasing your source code or anything like that. You can just create a separate app and have an add-on that communicates between the two So another thing that's pretty clear right now is open source does not equal free They're they're not the same thing because somebody is always paying for the work that happens so in the case of Blender a lot of people donate and that's how they get money, but You know if somebody is not paying for it, then it's being paid for by somebody's time so It's always being paid for it by somebody and when it comes to selling add-ons We're just kind of switching which end of the equation the money is coming in at but there's always money or a significant amount of time involved So on the market, of course, you're not just paying for the code itself That's something that's really important to us. It's also about the experience So we want to make sure that our products are our quality and so you have that peace of mind When a creator puts an add-on on the market or you know a model or anything like that Part of the terms and agreements that they sign is that they have to be available for communication with their customers so if You know, you have an issue you have that peace of mind of knowing that you can you know immediately contact whoever made it Submit a bug report and they'll get back to you and if they can't then you know You can talk to us will either you know, we're happy to give you a refund if anything goes wrong but you know if we have an issues an issue with Developers, you know not getting back to you or anything like that. We had one instance where Or a creator just didn't have enough time to support his products So we had to take those off the market. So that was definitely unfortunate No hard feelings. He just didn't have any time anymore for that But we wanted to make sure that all of our customers can get the access To the support they need as soon as possible. So it's also about that that peace of mind things should just work You shouldn't have to worry about it whatsoever So that's what we started with that was the dream in the vision But let's take a look at where we are today in terms of hard numbers So these are all 2016 year-to-date. So January through October where we're at so far First of all, we have about three hundred and thirty three thousand dollars of revenue coming in So that's up 31% from last year, which is definitely awesome We also have two hundred and eighty two thousand about in operation costs. So that is Development a chunk of that is development for the market 2.0, which I'll talk about in just a second but that's also just you know regular upkeep Paying for servers and the plugins that we use and of course paying Matthew and occasionally myself to go through products Make sure doing the quality assurance reviews communicating with creators Everything like that. So it's definitely not a cheap thing to run day today and So far we've paid almost two hundred thousand dollars to our creators just this year So vendors that are on the market In addition, we've donated nineteen thousand dollars to the blender development fund So that's something we're super proud of because that's not our donation This is actually just out of the generosity of our vendors. So we have a separate donation for CG cookie. This is not that When a creator creates a product, they have an option of donating a certain percentage. It's totally optional. They don't have to But they have the option of donating just a certain percentage of that directly to the blender development fund and by making it easy to do So a lot of them are are happy to do that and so far that's resulted in about nineteen thousand this year So if you look at these numbers, you'll notice that well, they don't quite add up And that's because right now we're running at about a hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars under So CG cookie is is eating that loss right now and that's certainly a chunk of change So Another couple couple numbers 31 percent More in sales since last year and our our users are in this case just web sessions The users were about the same graph have stayed pretty consistent But it's a valid question to ask you know for if our users are staying the same and we're operating at a Net loss, you know, why are we still going? Why are we still? Continuing to do this and not only that why are we continuing to invest more in the project? so that's definitely a valid question and The way that we see it is that the blender market is kind of like CG cookie zone little mini startup And so far we're pretty happy with the results So a lot of businesses don't start making positive money until you know the third or fourth year So it's nothing completely unexpected But also just for having it be a little over two years old It's close to generating You know half a million dollars to put into the blender ecosystem that wasn't there before so people that are using blender people that are selling and and Creating things with it. That's half a million dollars that wasn't in that space at all before and with you know Close to $20,000 being donated to the development fund that also wasn't there before that's definitely something. We're happy to invest in and Also, I don't have a lot of testimonials Matthew gets gets most of those But I've definitely seen more than a couple that have said that you know Since they've had a successful product on the blender market that they don't have to work as much over time and can spend more time doing the things that they love and so We know that we're on the right track and we're happy to invest in the success of people So I've talked a little bit about blender market 2.0. I've mentioned that a couple times. So what is that well? This is a complete recode of the market as it stands So we were hoping to have this ready yet in time for the conference last week But unfortunately there were some server issues and it'll be out coming this week So we're definitely excited to have you take a look at that But the reason we decided to create a completely new version of it is because the old blender market was created in Wordpress and that came with its with its own slew of issues. So it started out. Okay. It worked. It worked. Okay But there were definitely some some hardships and one of those was we had to rely heavily on third-party plugins So we couldn't create everything ourselves and we had to you know, use other people's stuff And so we didn't have as much control as we would like over the actual process of what happened And if you know for some reason they broke something in one of their updates, we couldn't really fix it We didn't have anything we could do about it And so we just kind of had to eat those costs as they came up And so since we were relying on quite a few that definitely had become an issue Another thing is we couldn't iterate very fast. We couldn't make Very many new features Development was very very slow and it was time-consuming to upkeep So now we're creating everything completely from scratch using Ruby on Rails And that's allowed us to make a very smooth web app That's a much better experience and this solves a lot of the headaches behind the scenes for sure it'll make it much faster for For Matthew and myself to go through products and review and we've added some new features that will definitely make Experience for everybody quite a bit better So we've made it easier for customers to purchase. So that's definitely important. We want that to be as streamlined as possible But we've also made it a whole lot easier to submit your products So before that was pretty A cumbersome form that was really ugly and you had to fill it out all at once There was no saving it as a draft you had to type out everything all in one sitting and submit it that way And it took a really long time to get reviewed. So we fixed that with a really smooth form quick process you can submit it whenever you'd like and you can leave us comments and We can email you straight from there Another thing that we've added is reviews So before you purchase a product you can see what other people have thought about it And you know if you had a good experience or bad experience you can let the creator know right in their reviews And so that's definitely something that's been proven on on multiple Websites to increase sales. So that's something we're looking forward to having Another interesting feature that's worth mentioning is the inbox So I know we all have enough inboxes in our lives But this one's super cool because all of the communication that happens around the market is all in one single place So if you have a question about a product, you can ask it right on the product page But the creator gets that in their inbox The same place is if you have a support question the creator also gets that in their inbox And so they can handle everything all in one area And it allows really easy communication between either the customers and ourselves or the customers and the creators or the creators and us So it definitely is is more helpful in that So that's what we've been up to recently Going forward we have a few ideas. So these are things. We're just spitballing. We definitely know that we're going to continue forward with London Market 2.0 and refine the experience as much as possible. That's the Sorry, that's the big plan But also in addition to that we've been spitballing a few ideas that are not set in stone But things that we might think would be interesting. So one of those is to incentivize creators to make things that we know will Sell well. So one thing that's an issue with online market places is people create a lot of really random things that you Wouldn't really expect people would want to buy and that's totally fine. It kind of you know fills it out And you get some some really interesting products But a lot of time there's things that we know will sell well, but creators just haven't made so for example Modular asset packs for James. We know that's a huge thing But there's only like one or two of them on the market So an idea would maybe be to incentivize people to make those either with like a reward system or You know giving a bounty for the first person who creates it or something like that. I just create a fun system for Getting the right products to attract customers Another idea and I think this was from Tom. I'm not entirely sure I wasn't there for this conversation But it sounds interesting is use the fund Use the money that's going towards the Blender development fund and hire our own Blender developer and so the way that that would might work is instead of bothering the The Blender foundation with all of our bug reports or issues that our creators have We can just hire our own developer and have them work on issues So if somebody's trying to you know make the infamous make render perfect button But they have this issue with you know some small thing in Blender That's just not working instead of bothering the Blender foundation We can just hire our own person and take care of it for them And so we'd make sure that those those changes are in alignment with the Blender guidelines and make sure that it gets patched for everybody So it would benefit benefit everybody. So those are a few ideas that we have There's definitely a lot of stuff going on. So that's just a quick overview of where the market's at so far. So That's that's all I've got today But if you want to talk we definitely want to be as open and transparent as possible So if you have any questions whatsoever feel fleet feel free to flag me down in the hallway I'd be happy to talk. So thanks for listening and have a good rest of the conference