The previous posts in this series have explored how to model your virtual world growth and the revenues:

• Calculate how much you can afford to spend acquiring a new player
• Calculate how the addressable market size affects your business model 

We're now onto the less exciting part of our business model, costs. In this post we'll develop a model for estimating how much time (and money) you can expect to spend moderating, supporting, and keeping your community safe. While this post is focused on virtual worlds, by tweaking the numbers it can be applied to any online community.

If you want to skip the explanation you can jump straight into the spreadsheet.

Why both moderating?
In my experience, moderation is one of those activities that everyone knows they should do, but when it comes to preparing the business plan the costs are plucked out of the air, or worse, ignored all together.

Moderation is not cheap and it is essential, so factor it into your model from the start.

If you want players to spend money in your world then you're really asking their parents to spend money in your world. Parents want their children to be safe and if they don't think your world is safe, you can be sure they won't be opening their wallets.

I advise all our partners to embrace safety, even make it a feature. Club Penguin used safety as a selling point; earning the parents trust was key to reaching their $70M a year in revenues.

What is moderation?
The moderation team have two responsibilities, keeping the players safe, and responding to support requests.

Support requests are non urgent, including payment issues, problems with the players account, or complaints. These can be responded to within 24 hours.

Where as, keeping your players safe requires realtime monitoring of the world, immediately responding to 'abuse' reports, checking profanity logs, and quickly approving uploaded images.

As you would expect, the actual cost of moderation scales with the popularity of the world; the busier the world the greater the number of support requests and the more players to keep safe.

During the busy times of the day we need to staff up with more moderators to monitor the chat rooms and respond to reports. Whereas, support requests can be answered over the course of a day.

To figure out how many moderators we're going to need we must calculate two things; how many players are online at any point in time, and how much moderation time the average player takes up. These two numbers can then be multiplied to get the number of moderators needed at any point.

Moderation Time
We start by listing out all the moderation tasks and all the support tasks. Against each of these we'll estimate how much time a moderator will need to resolve the issue.

Lastly, for each task, we'll estimate the probability that the average player will have that issue. For example, we might expect for every hundred online players at least one will report an other player. So the probability is 1 in 100, 1%, or 0.01.

A quick example. Lets say that on average a report takes 3 minutes to resolve, and 1% of our online users report someone, then we can calculate the average report time per user as:

(3 mins / 60 mins) x 1% = 0.0005 Hours = 0.03 Mins = 2 Secs

We find, on aggregate, for every online user a moderator spends 2 seconds responding to reports.

Repeat the process for all other moderation activities and we get the total average moderation time per user.

Support requests follow broadly the same process. However, in this case its the total number of unique visitors that drives the number of requests, not the number of concurrent players.

For example, we might estimate that 0.1% of our total monthly unique players will have a payment issue, and each issue takes 6 minutes to solve. We find how much time is spent per unique user by:

(6 mins / 60 mins) x 0.1% = 0.0001 Hours = 0.006 Mins = 0.4 Secs

Again, repeat the process for all other support activities. We end up with two tables that look something like these:

Number of Moderators
Now we know the average moderation time per user figuring out the number of moderators is pretty simple, we just need to know how many players are online.

In this post I explored one approach to modeling hourly visitors as a normal distribution (its a long math heavy post, consider yourself warned!). Using the spreadsheet in that post we can find the number of concurrent players given the number of monthly uniques.

All we need to do now is multiply the number of concurrent players by the average moderation time per user to get the total amount of moderation.

For example, we estimated in the tables above that each user requires 0.00167 hours of moderation time, so if there are 1000 players online:

0.00167 × 1000 = 1.67 Hours = 1 Hour 40 Minutes

Of course, no one is perfectly efficient, do while there might be 60 minutes in a hour its safer to assume that our moderators also spend some time browsing the site, responding to adhoc requests, and perhaps achieve 75% efficiency. In other words, for every hour they'll get through:

60 Minutes x 75% = 45 Minutes of work

So, for our 1 hour 40 minutes of work we can calculate how many moderators we need by:

1 Hours 40 Minutes / 45 Minutes = 2.2 Hours = 2 Hours 13 Minutes

So, where there are 1,000 players online we have 2 hours and 13 minutes of moderation work. We can't employ someone for only 13 minutes an hour, so we round up to 3 moderators.

I've pulled all this together into a spreadsheet here. The spreadsheet adds a couple of little extras like adjustable moderation hours and more fine grained configuration.

Its only a guide!
Here at Dubit we developed virtual worlds on top our our platform, and although we've moderated for a number of customers, including Sky Sports and Cartoon Network, please only use the numbers in this model as a guide. Your actual milage will vary depending on your community and your moderation tools.

Summary

• If you want parents to spend money in your world you need to take safety very seriously. Parents will not endorse an unmoderated community. 
• The moderation team have two responsibilities, keeping the players safe, and responding to non-urgent support requests.
• Moderation costs scale as your world grows. You don't need to hire a big team from day one. 
• You do, however, need to have enough moderators ready for peak hours.
• Good moderation and support tools will save you a lot of time and money. These are worth investing in from the start. At a minimum you need configurable allowed word filtering, banned word filtering, automatic banning, user reports, report delegation, user level blocking, moderator to room messaging, user to moderator messaging, and unrestricted room access.

If you'd like to find out more about our virtual world platform or how our CRB vetted moderators can help keep your community safe, then get in touch with matthew.warneford@dubitlimited.com.

Matthew Warneford
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