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I'm an outsider who wants to know something. What makes furries a fandom? What is there to be a fan of? (I don't judge. I know several furries.)

submitted by Bamzooki1
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It's autumn for the Northern Hemisphere. And as the wind gets colder and the leaves start to fall down with the sunset, a fall festival opens near you! The poster for it says it has a corn maze, a pumpkin field, a jack-o-lantern contest, apple cider, cinnamon donuts and so much more!

What do you do at the festival?

submitted by topaz_colite
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Advertising Statistics and ROI for Authors: Part 1 by Patrick “Bahumat” Rochefort   In a past career and under current contracts, I’m responsible for the advertising analysis of clients and customers. As a small business owner and operator, making sure that my dollars spent pay back in sales is critical for me. In this series, I’m going to dissect and analyze my paid advertising efforts for my current webserial, From Winter’s Ashes.   I advertised the WebSerial through three major channels of online targeted advertising:    Reddit – 170 million users, offers targeted advertising by subreddit. In this case, /r/Fantasy with a user base of 83,750 readers, with a peak daily readership of ~1300. Facebook – 1.5 billion users, 1.1 billion active users. Twitter: 316 million active users.   My methodology on this analysis involved making minimum advertising commitments to each advertising channel. Each represents the minimum financial commitment through advertising on that channel:   Reddit: $10, for a month-long campaign on modestly populated subreddit. Facebook: $35, at $5/day for a week.  Twitter: $35, at $5/day for a week.   Understanding your key metrics for advertising your writing and determining the cost effectiveness:   1. Impressions. How many times was your advertisement served? Chances are good that actual human eyeballs didn’t see them. (Thanks, AdBlocker). Depending on the website, 35%-85% of users block ads. Young markets with tech-savvy users block ads much more. 2. Clicks / “Engagements”. How many times was one of your advertisements actually interacted with? 3. Engagement rate: What percentile of your ads served resulted in an interaction? (For Search advertising, 3% is a good target. For display advertising, 0.3% is a solid average.) So per thousand impressions, expect an average of 30 clicks on Search advertising like Google, and 0.3% on display advertising like Reddit/Facebook/Twitter. 4. Cost Per Click (CPC). The core metric in any advertising campaign: Divide the cost of your campaign by the number of times the ad was interacted with. That’s what you paid per click.  5. Conversion rate: What percentage of visits to your website, overall, resulted in income? 6. Conversion income: What’s the average income that a conversion supplies you? 7. AIpV / Average Income Per Visitor: On average, how much money do you make per click on your website? 8. ROI-A: Return on investment on your advertising. Realistically, 10-20% is a good target. Most ads, if they’re profitable at all (most aren’t), will return only 10-20% more in additional sales than the advertising cost you. The best campaign I’ve ever run for a client returned a 310% ROI, but that was a finely tuned Google Search ad campaign for a regional, limited-supply professional service.    Be aware that some advertisers (Facebook) will obfuscate their metrics or want you to use their own interaction metrics, which can make it very difficult to determine to industry standards some of these metrics. If you plan to make a serious advertising campaign on one of these advertisers, spend extra time learning what metrics will matter, and look to professional advertiser forums for appropriate targets for your campaign there.     How to determine if your advertising campaign for your writing will be profitable (MATH TIME):   1. Look up your own website’s conversion rate. (If you don’t know, divide your number of transactions on your site in a month by the number of unique visitors in a month. Google Analytics can help you determine this.)
2. Determine your conversion income. (Divide your monthly income from your site by the number of paying customers on your site.) 3. Divide your conversion rate by your conversion income.  4. Look up the average CPC on the advertising channel.  5. Compare that against your AIpV.    Chances are distressingly good that your advertising campaign will not be profitable. Sorry. Just because it won’t be profitable doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be useful, however. When building a name or a brand, having a lot of Impressions hitting eyeballs consistently can help build your brand awareness, and get your name to stick in people’s minds.   A sample advertising campaign, using plausible numbers:   Author writes a book titled “FooDog Generic Fantasy”, and sells it directly from their own website as well as through other distribution channels. It’s a nice book! It’s got great cover art, a solid synopsis with plenty of hooks, and the pricing is well within market norms for a genre book.   Author decides they want to advertise their book. The Author has a choice between two fundamentally different kinds of online advertising: Search Advertising, and Display Advertising. Search advertising displays when someone searches for a related search term that the Author specifies. Display advertising shows to (potentially) just anyone visiting a site/network.   Because the product is a book with a specific title, Author wisely decides that people aren’t likely to be searching for their book by name if they don’t know about it. The title of their fabulous book is “FooDogs Generic Fantasy”, and Author rightly determines that almost nobody will do a Google Search for the nonsense term “FooDogs” unless they already know about the book anyway, and the words “generic” and “fantasy” aren’t going to be useful search terms. (Google will agree with them, and degrade or decline their advertising.)   So Author wisely decides to advertise FooDog Generic Fantasy on display ads, instead. Author is hopefully either decent with art design, or else they’ll be paying someone else for nice artwork for their ads. If Author is going to do it themselves, Author needs to know the technical specifications of the display advertising on their channel, such as resolution of image, size limits, file formats, and form factors. Author will also have to invest the time (10-30 minutes per channel) setting up their user accounts to advertise.    It takes Author 1 hour to make their own art to their satisfaction, and Author spends 30 minutes setting up their first advertising campaign, researching, and implementing the ad, and another 30 minutes tuning it to their target: Readers who would plausibly enjoy and be interested in FooDog Generic Fantasy. Author knows not to waste their money advertising to people who would prefer to read Wartime Specific NonFiction, so they ensure their ads go where they’d be most effective.   Author makes a $35 investment in one weeks’ worth of advertising, and is down 2 hours of labour.   After week’s worth of waiting and tweaking, Author’s results come in:   Impressions: 35,000 Clicks: 105 Engagement Rate: 0.3% Cost per Click: $0.33   Author’s results from this advertising campaign are firmly average for a Display ad campaign. So, the advertiser is delivering pretty average results on the internet. Not great, not terrible.    Next, Author goes to their own website, to track their statistics:   Visitors last week: 105 Conversions: 3 Visitors this week: 210
Conversions: 7   Conversion Rate: 3%. (Firmly average for retail sales online. Not great. Not terrible.)   Author sells FooDog Generic Fantasy eBook for a retail price of $6.00. Of that $6.00, $4.85 is the Author’s profit after taxes and fees.    Since this is all that the Author currently sells on their site, calculating the average income per conversion is easy: $4.85.   Author’s advertising campaign ostensibly brought in 4 additional customers, for a net benefit of $19.40.    The ROI-A on this advertising campaign, therefor, is -45%. Ouch!    BUT.
  While it cost the author money out of pocket to commit to this advertising, it teaches the Author a few valuable lessons about their own website’s offerings:    1. Author’s advertising campaign was average, it was middle of the road, it was unremarkable. It worked. It was not a failure. By every metric the professionals care about, the ad did what it was supposed to do. 2. Author’s website sucks at making them money.  3. Author paid only $15.60 (net) to double their site traffic for a week, and put their name and brand awareness into the minds of 105 additional customers. That’s about $0.15 per potential customer, and that isn’t counting the number of people who saw Author’s name and advertising and had it stick in their minds.   If Author had, say, a second and third book to offer on their website for sale, that average income per conversion might rise from $4.85 to $7.50 as readers found interesting looking titles to buy. In this case, Author would still be losing money, but they would be losing only $5.00 for the same advertising and brand marketing benefit.   The better your website is at making conversions of visitors, the more effective your advertisement will be. We’ll see in part 2 my personal experiences with advertising channels, and why controlling your CPC (and, more importantly, improving your conversion rate and income-per-conversion) matters for an author.    

submitted by TakeMyKnot
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submitted by X_Joshi_X
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I stumbled upon a new music artist who happen to have and anthropomoprhic fox as his online persona/fursona. I cannot confirm he's a furry but hey foxes are good enough for me!

His songs seem to be inspired by 16-bit/8-bit game music instrumentals!

A few songs I picked out that I thought were interesting and popular from his fan base. Enjoy!

Dr.Wily Stage 1 (Laffe the Fox Remix)

Cats Don't play Video Games

Short Days and Long Days

Extreme Krocket ft.Rymdkraft

Breaks Are Hard to Catch

Heaven for Monsters

I decided to try something different with music be under appreciated here!

submitted by Ryuu_Girl
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submitted by Travis1905
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submitted by Ryuu_Girl
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submitted by Ryuu_Girl
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So the past three days have been excellent for me, going out to a meet and enjoying myself is the best thing I've done since I joined a chat and met Harmony who altered my life for the better. I love this community, and all those in it. I'm so glad that I came out from the shadows to start getting involved. Just wanted to thank you all, you're amazing don't stop being yourselves for anything.

submitted by Sif_Jynx_Shirkuru
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submitted by HuskySilver
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It looks like you're getting two for the price of one. I released Part Five last night and Part Six tonight. Lucky you. Please read Part Five before continuing on with this. As always, please post comments or questions. Something to let me know anyone's reading this. Thanks in advance if you choose to do so. And now, here's Part Six!

In Topaz's dorm, the gryphon and Scorch were getting ready for the dance. The dragon was already in his red tuxedo. He chose to go with a green bowtie as well. Topaz was already in his usual outfit, a black suit with his plaid robe and fedora. This time the macaroni was purple.

"So... That was crazy. What happened last night." Topaz began as the clock neared ten.

"Yeah. I suppose we're closer because of that." Scorch replied. "I'm sorry about Crystal."

"It's alright. Things happen and we move on. I got over her and now I have Cacturne." Topaz said. Scorch agreed, tightening his bowtie.

He continued, "I think maybe Cacturne's jealous of Crystal."

"Why?"

"Well the way you talked about her last night. It sounds like you still have something for her."

"Maybe I do. I dunno. I thought I moved on. I mean I can't help it to remember her."

"I suppose us guys are allowed a look every now and then." Scorch chuckled.

Topaz rebuked, "What about Ignis? It looks like she has something for you."

The dragon was shocked. "For me? What does she see in me?"

"I don't know. But you were pretty love struck when you saw her before the party." Topaz smiled.

"Well," Scorch stammered, "She was beautiful. But I don't know if I exactly love her."

"Well, I'd advise that you figure that out as soon as possible." Topaz left the room for the dance. Scorch looked at himself in the mirror and sighed.

"And is that how you do it?" Ignis asked.

"Yep! That's Scorch's favorite hairstyle." Cacturne said as she fixed Ignis's ponytail. The crow put some hairspray on the she-wolf's long black hair. The two girls were in Ignis's room.

"How do you know so much about Scorch likes?" Ignis asked the crow.

"Well, being the only girl in a group allows one to observe what the other guys like. I've noticed Scorch checking out other girls with ponytails. He's too shy to talk to them though. As for Topaz, he wasn't checking out other girls. I actually thought he had something for guys that he didn't want to show." Cacturne explained.

"Turns out he just had a troubled love life and he wasn't ready. How did you two get together?" Ignis asked smoothing her green dress.

"Ah, that day I'll never forget. It was a warm summer day and I was exploring the park. I'd just moved in and I wanted to explore. I literally ran into Topaz and Scorch. Seriously, Topaz was rollerblading and Scorch was trying to catch up on his bicycle. He crashed into me and apologized almost immediately." Cacturne chuckled. "We saw each other during lunch and decided to sit at the same table for the rest of the year. We made friends pretty quickly and within a couple of weeks, we just got... hooked."

"Wow. Well. Are you ready for the dance?" Ignis asked. The crow nodded and prepared her yellow dress. The two girls left to meet their dates.

The four of them met in front of the gym. A limousine came up and Missy along with his boyfriend Bill. She sneered at Ignis who growled and folded her ears back.

“Relax, Ignis. We’re here to have fun.” Scorch said. The she-wolf did so reluctantly.

“Come on guys. They’ll have all the tables taken if we don’t go in now.” Cacturne said wanting to change the subject. The group agreed and they entered the heavily decorated gym. The school had gone all out for the dance. Pyrotechnics lit the stage and the DJ. Streamers were dangled everywhere. Even the snacks were prime. There were juicy chicken kabobs, savory beef chunks, and spicy hummus and fresh chopped tomatoes on baked bread. The balloons took up the corners of the snack tables. Everyone was socializing, sipping their sodas or punches. The events at Missy’s party had caused the school to put the drinks in a locked freezer to ensure no one would try to drug them. Still, a couple of people always sniffed their drinks before putting the cup to their lips. There was some music already on so the girls dragged the boys on to the floor. There, they started a quick waltz. Topaz wasn’t as skilled at this dance as Cacturne so he kept apologizing for stepping on her toes. Meanwhile, Scorch taught Ignis how to dance the waltz. When the song was over, the four of them applauded with the rest of the crowd. Cacturne tapped Topaz’s shoulder and whispered in his ear hole. The gryphon blushed and the two of them went off to the school grounds. Ignis ignored them as she stared into Scorch’s eyes with affection. This made Scorch squirm nervously. When the song ended. Scorch took this as his chance and said he had to go to the bathroom. As he relieved himself, he thought Does she really want to date me? But she can’t. I don’t want to break her heart.... He figured out what he wanted to do with a sigh. The dragon approached the she-wolf by the snack table and braced himself. Scorch started, ”Ignis. I don’t think we should date each other. I mean I understand you like me an-” Ignis responded ferociously with a slap in Scorch’s face. While Scorch recovered, the she-wolf started crying and ran away. Scorch ran after her but stopped when he reached the outside steps. He was exhausted as he saw Ignis turn the corner and run back to her dorm. Scorch noticed two people run up from behind him. “Hey guys.” Scorch greeted Topaz and Cacturne. “What were you doing?” Topaz blushed, “Erm, we were kissing.” “What did you do to Ignis? You know she had something for you!” Cacturne stared daggers at Scorch. “I don’t know. It’s just that… I can’t be with her.” Scorch stammered. “Why not?” Cacturne asked. Scorch just shook his head. “Well, we have to go get her. She can’t spend her night in her dorm with the rest of us here.” Topaz said. The other two agreed and they went around the corner. It shocked them to see a strange item sitting in the middle of the courtyard. It was a red door.

Before you ask, no. Topaz and Cacturne were just kissing. There was nothing else going on that your minds were creating. Thanks again for reading this. Please comment for criticism, questions, the self-knowledge that someone is actually reading this. Please, I want to know how many are.

submitted by topaz_colite
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submitted by DragonNamedRed
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Hello /r/furry, I am a new user to this subreddit, I used to be a brony and kinda lost touch with the MLP fandom, and recently started sorta getting into the furry fandom, I don't have a fursona or anything of that matter, yet. And I came here to ask where to start. Thanks all.

submitted by Baglesman
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Hey guys! Long story short, Im offering small commissions due to my significant other and I needed a better car than we currently have. There are too many dmg's on it and it's got way to many miles on it. It would be cheaper to get a better car than to make those significant repairs.

We're gonna try to trade it into the dealership, though they are only taking it for a small amount, we need to save up 6k to pay off the rest.

Here's what Im offering; FA Link - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/17705702/ Imgur Link - http://i.imgur.com/pFmV5G0.png

If you take interest in a commission, feel free to either Note me on my FA, or PM me here on reddit. Small commissions can be completed pretty quickly.

submitted by Darachi
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