Unfairness in placing advertisements

[Brian Peace]

If we lower the prices more airlines will buy ads and thus it will take longer for your ad to show up on the website. I don't know if you really want that. And a 1000x airline having the money to spend $240mio on ads won't keep the 1000x multiplier for a long time and it will get harder for them to spent so much money on advertising quickly.

So, I personally like the way it is at the moment where buying sidebar-ads is not something you can do easily while expanding your airline.

First - I never asked you to LOWER prices... just to make it fair to all airlines. Right now it's insanely one sided. Im sorry but I need to be blunt here. There's no way I should have to make my guys fly TWO HUNDRED PLUS flights, for one add, when another airline can make that money in ONE flight! It's absurd!

Second - On the contrary, Buying sidebar adds is extremely easy for an expanding airlines to do, and next to near impossible for established and reputable airlines on here (you know, the one's who will be supporting you?).

Please consider making some changes to this system.

[CAPFlyer]

Konrad, I'm sorry, but Brian is right.

Maintenance is bearable (and still profitable) at the 50x level. Ads have no way of being anywhere close at the 50x level. We're not talking about 1x multiplier airlines here, we're talking about those using the preset levels. All that needs to be done is to take the current rates and set those as the 1000x multiplier rates and then scale down from there based on multiplier. This way they'll still be expensive, but they won't be so expensive that it takes months to recover the costs as it does now. You should be able to return your costs within the period of advertisement (i.e. if you make a 2 week ad, you should be able to repay the costs within 2 weeks). Right now, even at the best case scenario, you're looking at 2 months for a 2 week ad when operating at 50x. This is not reasonable.

[danmand]

Sorry but to me this is a "economic" issue not a "fairness" one.

Theoretically, if you have a small multiplier, then you should have a larger volume of income generating flights to compensate.

Brian you don't have a large number of flights to count for your multiplier. Your multiplier comes from (as far as I can tell) a HUGE surplus of aircraft compared to the number of pilots you have and the number of flights you do.

I'd suggest selling off your large inventory of aircraft to match your pilots / flights. That should (correct me if I'm wrong here admins) raise your multiplier and increase the income of your airline so you can afford the ads better.

my 2 cents.

Dan

[CAPFlyer]

Actually, once your multiplier goes down, it stays down.

[danmand]

The multiplier stays down?

If that's true then a younger airline with 5 planes / 5 pilots will make more money than an older airline that has the same pilots / planes but once had a lot more?

If that is the case, then yes I agree. Brian has an excellent point and something should be done about it.

Dan

[Konny]

If you spend all your money on ads your multiplier will go up again. When you buy ads then the money is gone and therefore the value of your airline declines which could enable you to raise the multiplier. But I don't think that's a comfortable option .

Anyway, if we apply the multiplier to the ad costs I think we also have to raise the current prices as they would be way too cheap then. I just checked and there are currently 18 actives sidebar-ads. They are cycled hourly so you roughly have to buy 3 hours for two days ( = $15mio ). If we say that a 25x airline gets $1mio per flight, they have to do ~8 flights per day to cover that. That sounds a lot but on the other hand a 25x airline also has more than $10bio in assets, so they should be able to do some flights per day.

In my opinion we could lower the costs a bit (maybe from $5mio to $3mio) but if we apply the multiplier we also have to start thinking about consequently doing that in other areas, too ( like aircraft purchase ) which would probably make things more confusing. It might be unfair, but this is what the dynamic multiplier is for (making it easier for the smaller airlines) and it seems like I'm not the only who says it's ok the way it is. And if I look at the 25x airlines we have here, most of them have billions in cash...

[Brian Peace]

well I guess the issue as I see it is that I once had more active pilots and now most of them dont fly as much so it would be nice to be ABLE to advertise for pilots to fly this big fleet. Currently we cannot do that, becuase of a fairness issue.

[flightsimer]

If you spend all your money on ads your multiplier will go up again. When you buy ads then the money is gone and therefore the value of your airline declines which could enable you to raise the multiplier. But I don't think that's a comfortable option .

Anyway, if we apply the multiplier to the ad costs I think we also have to raise the current prices as they would be way too cheap then. I just checked and there are currently 18 actives sidebar-ads. They are cycled hourly so you roughly have to buy 3 hours for two days ( = $15mio ). If we say that a 25x airline gets $1mio per flight, they have to do ~8 flights per day to cover that. That sounds a lot but on the other hand a 25x airline also has more than $10bio in assets, so they should be able to do some flights per day.

In my opinion we could lower the costs a bit (maybe from $5mio to $3mio) but if we apply the multiplier we also have to start thinking about consequently doing that in other areas, too ( like aircraft purchase ) which would probably make things more confusing. It might be unfair, but this is what the dynamic multiplier is for (making it easier for the smaller airlines) and it seems like I'm not the only who says it's ok the way it is. And if I look at the 25x airlines we have here, most of them have billions in cash...

your forgetting one thing though. they didnt make that 10bil or however much they have in a week, normally its YEARS.

these are all true figures for 2009 from North Eastenr Airways

*last year, my airline made $690,474,494 (25x) on flights from 6 pilots (all flights i did, i made no money personally)
*$690,474,494= 138 hours
*spent 88mil on repairs
*1.5mil on aircraft transfers
*gave 14.8mil in bonuses to pilots
*total expesnses:104.3mil
*net income:585.7mil

so with 585mil i can buy 117 hours of ads
but say i want 1 airliner, thats gonna be 52-310mil which when converted into hours is 10-62 hours PER aircraft (737 size up to A380)
if i buy one A380 then now im down to just 55 hours. thats 55 hours out of 8760 hours of the year.

i wouldnt be supprised if the same amount of people see the login ads compared to the sidebars if not more.

[Brian Peace]

so almost 3 months has passed and there has been no movement on this issue. Being unable to advertise for pilots is really choking me.... how can I run an airline without being able to attract pilots (advertising dollar).... in fact I'm so upset by this... so much so that if this issue is not resolved I will personally not renew my subscription next year. Please update me of the status of a solution on this issue to make it fair for all airlines equally. Thank you.

[MOW]

I'm brand new on the FSA system.

I paid attention to this topic, because, as a new company, I'm 1000x currently. To say the truth, I will say hopefully ! Trying to expand a full VA net on France force me to solve some questions before, the first one being : do I want to be realistic or not. I mean, am I going to fly all my VA lines with the same plane, whereas it is timely impossible. It means that I need to buy 1 plane for each line I wish this plane to apply, especially because I wish a 7 days a week company. Without the 1000x, it will be impossible to reach this goal.

In the other hand, my choice is to play with the FSP system with carrier mode. Currently, being c7, I should be able to buy an Airbus, but I do not have enough money in FSP (whereas I do have in FSA). To try to reach the financial capacity is quite pleasant by the way. It means, to make everything nearly immediately reachable is not so funny at this end (at least, for me).

Now, to go back to the subject of this topic, I can understand the unfairness feeling of Brian, but I really do prefer to be a 1000x company, and especially because I do not want to challenge anyone. I just want to fly with a goal to reach. I looked once to the statistics menu, and I do not find it interesting. I will never go there again.

But, one proposal to solve this issue, could be to challenge VA in "multiplier" category. It means x1000 with x1000 and so on. A company wishing to shift from one category to the other one, should see its fund recalculated IOT join the new category. I'm not so experienced on the site to see if this solution could word, but it is the proposal coming to my mind reading this post. Hoping this could participate in solving this concern.

[Brian Peace]

so almost 3 months has passed and there has been no movement on this issue. Being unable to advertise for pilots is really choking me.... how can I run an airline without being able to attract pilots (advertising dollar).... in fact I'm so upset by this... so much so that if this issue is not resolved I will personally not renew my subscription next year. Please update me of the status of a solution on this issue to make it fair for all airlines equally. Thank you.

4 months now. Any progress on this admins?

[Konny]

Well, I'm actually still not convinced that we need to change the system that drastically. It's way easier for new airlines to advertise but that comes from the whole system of giving higher mutlipliers to new/small airlines which intends to give them an advantage. I always supported a fixed multiplier but that's another topic.
I would agree on generally lowering the sidebar-ads prices, maybe 2,000,000v$ instead 5,000,000v$ per hour, but applying the multiplier to the prices makes it to complicate I think. If we did that the prices would be for example 2mio for a 25x airline and 80mio for a 1000x airline.

[Brian Peace]

It's way easier for new airlines to advertise but that comes from the whole system of giving higher mutlipliers to new/small airlines which intends to give them an advantage.

they have enough of an advantage in being able to quickly acquire a fleet. Period.

There's no way I as a paying customer of yours should NOT be able to advertise for pilots on YOUR site just the same as anyone else. simply put.... end of my statements.. I've been looking for an amicable solution to this issue for a long time and have been pretty quiet and pretty patient.

[sandeo]

You can also trade in aircrafts... Say: you buy 737 for 20 million and sell it for 25 - 5 million "free" money.

[MHiles]

Konny does seem to be a bit too stubborn here. He is not listening to his PAYING customers.

I too think it unfair that one airline has to pay way more than another for an advertisement. Would a real life advertising company charge British Airways a vastly difference price than a smaller airline for the same advertisement space?

I think the price of advertisements should be the same for any FSA airline, just as buying an aircraft is, I believe, the same price regardless of the size of the VA.

Konny, even one of your admins has stated the current system is unfair. Listen you your PAYING customers.