Free vs Paid Instructions for MOCs

[Oh_Hi_Mao]

4 minutes ago, Sokolov Edward said:

To my regret these figures fully correlate with the attendance of this site - 100-200 members and up to 1000 guests and bots. If your sales are an order of magnitude higher then I can only be happy for you, but where are all these people - this is the most popular forum of Lego technics in Europe and the world.

Eric Trax has 35 thousand followers on the YouTube alone, how does this add to your "fully collerate" numbers?

[Timorzelorzworz]

3 minutes ago, Sokolov Edward said:

but where are all these people

You rely only to this forum. The world is bigger than this forum here. Rebrickable for example is the marketplace with millions of users. An own "community" where people can chat with each other, commenting models and so on.

[Lipko]

16 minutes ago, Timorzelorzworz said:

You rely only to this forum. The world is bigger than this forum here. Rebrickable for example is the marketplace with millions of users. An own "community" where people can chat with each other, commenting models and so on.

Exactly. The times when this forum was the leading medium for Lego MOC representations are long gone. About the time Lego hobby became very popular (a little too popularized) from a niche hobby, about 9 years ago (The Lego Movie was a giant hit in 2014). Back then, there were about a dozen MOCer legends, now I can't even keep up with them. Luckily this means that there are many excellent quality models, but sometimes it's hard to tell them apart from the mass of medicore-at-best models.

Edited September 17, 2024 by Lipko

[Sokolov Edward]

6 minutes ago, Oh_Hi_Mao said:

Eric Trax has 35 thousand followers on the YouTube alone, how does this add to your "fully collerate" numbers?

On YouTube with videos about Lego and around it people clearly earn more than from selling instructions.

8 minutes ago, Timorzelorzworz said:

You rely only to this forum. The world is bigger than this forum here. Rebrickable for example is the marketplace with millions of users. An own "community" where people can chat with each other, commenting models and so on.

You need to look not at the number of registrations, but at the attendance - the figures for long-standing forums can differ by orders of magnitude. I also know the German lepinboard - they discuss things that are not allowed here, but everything is even sadder there - entire sections are not updated for a year. Reddit also has a number of interesting threads, but these are not your clients.

[Timorzelorzworz]

1 minute ago, Lipko said:

The times when this forum was the leading medium for Lego MOC representations are long gone

For me personally this forum here is not a "sales booster" and it's not intended to make some adverts. People and user here are nearly always the same, either they know each other or they don't. The world is unfortunately big, and I sold instructions in literally every country to the world (yeah there are countries never heared about before :D). At this moment writing this, some guy in Stockholm Sweden is sitting in his kitchen and building one of my models with premium instructions .. or somewhere else on the world. Thats my spirit to do it, the happy and satisfied people

[roeltheworld]

I hope some smart people out there make some money off MOCs, in any way shape or form, including the Chinese. As for those who care a bit too much, well just look out of the window: you'll see the world moves on and it doesnt care about your feelings. lets just enjoy our toys.

[Lipko]

9 minutes ago, Timorzelorzworz said:

For me personally this forum here is not a "sales booster" and it's not intended to make some adverts. People and user here are nearly always the same, either they know each other or they don't. The world is unfortunately big, and I sold instructions in literally every country to the world (yeah there are countries never heared about before :D). At this moment writing this, some guy in Stockholm Sweden is sitting in his kitchen and building one of my models with premium instructions .. or somewhere else on the world. Thats my spirit to do it, the happy and satisfied people

Ah, it's you. You changed your nickname :)
I wish I knew how many people have built my stuff.

[Alex Ilea]

This has to be the most heated topic we had in a while 

Fun read tbh

[eric trax]

1 hour ago, Sokolov Edward said:

To my regret these figures fully correlate with the attendance of this site - 100-200 members and up to 1000 guests and bots. If your sales are an order of magnitude higher then I can only be happy for you, but where are all these people - this is the most popular forum of Lego technics in Europe and the world.

This forum is not a sales indicator. We share models here to talk about them. There are so many social media platforms these days that discussion forums are a smal part of the traffic that Instagram, YouTube or Facebook generate.

Registered users are irrelevant because a lot of people are buying on rebrickable as unregistered users/guests lately. Especially alternative models of the Mercedes G500 42177. I assume mostly from my YouTube in this specific case.

If you think Eurobricks is the biggest medium where you can reach people who want to build anything other than just the basic model from the official set, you are very wrong.

Edited September 17, 2024 by eric trax

[Milan]

@Timorzelorzworz
@Sokolov Edward

We created this topic to avoid disrupting MOC threads where selling instructions is part of the presentation.

I’m only asking for a civil discussion, with no personal attacks.
If the two of you can’t continue without insults, take the discussion to PM and leave this space for those who want a respectful conversation.

One page of insulting replies have been hidden.
Do not continue arguing.

[Sokolov Edward]

7 minutes ago, Milan said:

Do not continue arguing.

Thank you. You came at the right time. Judging by the discussion, I can say that everything is fine with the sale and I am afraid in vain. Let's close this discussion. Time is the best judge.

[Timorzelorzworz]

Also, your time will come...

[Timorzelorzworz]

5 hours ago, Lipko said:

Ah, it's you. You changed your nickname :)

No, unfortunately I don't. I already used this stupid name with this account before I started building models. I wrote 100 support-mails to the admin team with a polite request and asking them for changing my nickname. This should be nothing special nor nothing complicated. 100 times I got ignored with no response. And this explains this forum at all.

[Timorzelorzworz]

10 hours ago, Lipko said:

To make my standing point clear, I also think both viewpoints are valid, but I don't agree with being so secret. @eric trax

One thing to mention before it is going too monotonous: Things on rebrickable are not that super secret some people think. RB is very transparent on the public lists that everyone can see, if people deal with it.

https://rebrickable.com/mocs/#premium

This is the public premium MOC list. Most people are only landing on the hotness page, which only shows the most popular MOCs from the last days by page views. The second tab is more important imho. On the premium list, everyone can see public which payed Premium MOCs are performing best. This is all not super secret rocket science. When a model shows up there, it sells constantly good over few days. Both lists, hotness and premium sells, are changing very rapidely.

AND: taking a look to this list shows that Technic is always the minority and that other themes asking for more money for instructions. So all people should stop for trolling the minority.

Edited September 17, 2024 by Timorzelorzworz

[M_longer]

9 hours ago, Erik Leppen said:

Personally, I don't consider myself good enough

Said by guy who is a MOC-making God for me. Rrrrright.
I have started in 2007, drooling over your Brickshelf  gallery :D
Mostly by this I have tried to make C models:

[damian_kane_iv]

I always treat free mocs on rebrickable as a pleasant surprise. I dont see any harm in charging some money for a complex moc, but the prices for some of them can get questionably high

[bruh]

4 hours ago, damian_kane_iv said:

I always treat free mocs on rebrickable as a pleasant surprise. I dont see any harm in charging some money for a complex moc, but the prices for some of them can get questionably high

Totally agreed! Personally, because of my being in high school + no job :( I usually try not to buy Premium MOCS, so I am happy when I can find a free one! I don't judge Premium MOCS though. 

[M_longer]

One more thing - paid instructions sales had its peak trough Covid times. Sales dropped significantly after.

[Mikdun]

20 hours ago, damian_kane_iv said:

I always treat free mocs on rebrickable as a pleasant surprise. I dont see any harm in charging some money for a complex moc, but the prices for some of them can get questionably high

Same here.

[smazmats]

On 9/19/2024 at 11:46 AM, M_longer said:

One more thing - paid instructions sales had its peak trough Covid times. Sales dropped significantly after.

100% my experience as well. While I'm technically not a Technic builder, I am a Rebrickable creator and figured I'd share my 2c. When I used to sell premium instructions from 2020 - early 2023, I would typically see between 12-40 sales per month at the peak in 2021, but by the end of 2022 I was typically seeing between 10-22  sales a month. By the beginning of 2023, I was feeling burned out juggling all the administrative work off making/selling instructions plus a full time job and decided to pull the plug and just make everything free since sales were starting to decline anyways. I was so much happier afterwords and could enjoy Lego again as a hobby rather then a business .  I also think another reason for the sales slump besides the "pandemic-wind-down" is that Rebrickable is more mainstream and there are just more MOCs to compete with (were almost up to MOC #200,000 now). If you don't have an off site following /get viral on reddit or youtube, its impossible to get traction on your MOCs. Even their own promotional tools like the designer plan promo posts are over saturated (to their credit, It looks like they have improved it somewhat. When I was subscribed, It could take days to get featured on their Instagram page due to the backlog) and IMO never were very effective at getting sales.

On the Free vs Paid debate. I'm still in support of paid Instructions to an extent. Instructions can be a PITA to make and can take a long time to put together. I think it is worth it to pay creators for their hard work. However, once you start to charge money for something, there is a certain level of quality to be expected. Things like test building if designed all digitally in stud.io (especially with larger, more expensive builds where physics becomes an issue) or cleaning up he inventory to remove unnecessary old/rare/outdated parts should be standard practice, but aren't always followed. Also, I think there is some value in having a mix of free and premium instructions. Free instructions for smaller builds are an easy way of advertising yourself and showing off your skills as a MOC designer to users who will hopefully buy your premium instructions later on.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Can just agree to @smazmats.

Creating manuals is really a PITA and only people who tried may understand what amount of efforts are going into this. Building a digital model alone is just peanuts vs doing the steps of sorting the parts into the right buildorder, do all the groupings, adjusting the views etc pp... I had bad mood at my ~700 pieces models already, I just can't imagine to have to do this with plenty thousends of parts as I think I would go nuts before I finish... :D

On the other hand for me it is also just a Hobby and creating (my small) MOCs manuals was fun (to a certain amount.. ) and I would recommend to any person doing it to primarily earn money to search for a better paid job :D

[Berthil]

I have made free instructions of complex models with over more than 5000 pieces and all of them are for free. LEGO is a hobby for me and the enjoyment out of positive comments is much higher than any financial compensation could be. I like making instructions, I would not like the administrative hassle around selling instructions. I've sold designs to Chinese manufacturers from which sets in real boxes with printed instructions were created, they handle the support as it is their set. These were created because I wanted to make them before there was interested from the clone manufacturers. When I'm the sole designer of a MOC I ask for a donation but unfortunately not many do that.

I agree with a lot of comments here. It's a free world (for most) and anybody can do what they want but for me personally selling instructions is a no-go as I would not consider myself an AFOL anymore, just a commercial designer selling instructions which would be the end of a hobby for me.

[Timorzelorzworz]

On 9/22/2024 at 9:12 AM, aFrInaTi0n said:

I would recommend to any person doing it to primarily earn money to search for a better paid job :D

It's not that easy as easy it's said. When falling into a model project with 110% of head ressources, it's like an addiction, a drug, a totally flow in the head over weeks and sometimes over months and it's then almost impossible to break out. Finishing the model has then highest priority on job-level, making it in all glory as planned in the head over months before. BUT, in the end, the result was always delivered.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Glad you seem to have a higher motivation & I am appreciating this!

Besides the regular efforts to create a MOC manual, I am lately very unhappy with the stability of Studio over its updates.. different things are breaking left and right and one can't really tell if the next update may not deliver any new unforseeable errors..

And yes, I think I better search for a more or less recent version and stay with that.. but nevertheless the quality for me is not yet fitting "the new official lego digital building tool". Not blaming any of the devs, but I would wish for Lego investing a little in the app development to get the product into a polished state.

[Timorzelorzworz]

I personally (and I am sure many more people) totally agree with you about the bad stud.io performance and the bad updates. As an example, it's impossible to move a picture on a page in the instructions maker since my last update. It seems with every update there are more bugs coming than be fixed. One advice: Never update stud.io during at a project. Update only then when things are completely finished.