Tuesday, October 8, 2013

The Math Behind SOMER Blink

Disclaimer: Please note that this post is in no way meant to express an opinion regarding the recent controversy involving CCP handouts of valuable in-game and out of game items to SOMER Blink. 
This is just the ramblings of a nerd who likes to play with numbers.


How much ISK has SOMER Blink made?

Opening up the SOMER Blink website, I can extrapolate a few numbers based on a sampling of their lotteries. I decided to take ten lotteries,  and come up with an 'average percentage' of profit based upon current Jita prices of the ten items being 'lotteried.'

For example. SOMER had a Tengu lottery going at the time of this post. A Tengu costs 166.3 mil in Jita. SOMER was selling 8 tickets at 27.5 million per ticket for a total of 220 million. If you were to purchase an item at 166.3 and sell it at 220, the % profit would calculate out to 32%.

For all ten items, the following chart was born:



Now, before we do anything, let's take almost 50% of that off the top. Let's say that SOMER gives away or spends almost half of all their profits to sponsor various things, pay for promotional stuff and advertising, etc.

So now, we're sitting on a nice, workable figure of 25% profit.

At the time of writing this, the SOMER website reports to have given away 1,212,498,889,847,310 ISK in winnings. Now, we can take this figure several different ways. Perhaps it is the figure of given away value, after profit? Or, simply the sum of all total lotteries. Or, it could be the Jita value of all items lotteried.

I'm going to have to choose one, so let's say that it is simply the total ISK given away in lotteries based upon how much ISK was spent on the sum of all completed lotteries. Essentially, the 'amount of ISK to exchange hands' as it were.

At 25% profit, this would equate to approximately 303 trillion ISK.

This still seems crazy high, so for the sake of keeping our numbers conservative, let's say that SOMER really only makes 7%. I was once told by a little birdy that popular betting site EVE-Bet makes around 7% off the top. 7% sounds good.

At 7% profit, this would equate to approximately 84 trillion ISK netted in profits by SOMER Blink.


What is 84 trillion ISK, exactly? I mean, besides a really big number?

  • In Jita, a volume of around 25 billion tritanium gets sold each day, give or take. At an average of 4.87 ISK per trit, 84 trillion ISK could consume the entire daily volume of tritanium sold in Jita for around 1.8 years.
  • At around 4 billion ISK per fit ship, 84 trillion ISK would purchase a fleet of approximately 21,000 dreadnaughts.
  • At 1,000 ISK per LP, and an average of 17.5K LP and 15 minutes per plex, you would have to plex non stop for around 42.15 years at Tier 5 to obtain that much ISK. In so doing at Tier 5 rates, you would plex the entire Amarr/Minmatar warzone from start to finish 140 times.
  • At 500 million ISK and 15 USD per PLEX, that's approximately 2.52 million USD worth of PLEX. Or, it would fund a single account for 14,000 years.


SOMER Blink gives away 200 million  in 'credit' on their site when you purchase a GTC from them. At around 3 dollars in commission per 60 day GTC, if SOMER gave away all their profits for GTC purchases, they would net approximately 1.26 million USD in commissions.



12 comments:

  1. It would be much more complicated that that. You get bonus ISK with deposits, you get awards and gifts as you play, you are allocated Tokens which are useable in Promo.blinks and Minibonks. You also have Bonks and Gigablinks and bonus blinks (with 2x+ winnings) and apparently some 30 employees who are paid in some way. You can also to take winnings as ISK instead of the items (although not in all cases). Having said all of that - I'd be surprised if they made as little as 7% overall.

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  2. Yeah, I too believe its more than 7%. I'm more inclined to put it closer to 20% or so. As for the pay for their "employees", IIRC from their application information every employee gets a PLEX for the account they use when working, plus a wage which varies depending on the position (haulers get 1m/jump + hourly I believe, customer service gets 120m/hour, not sure what pre-auths get).

    @evehermit, what is this ISK bonus with deposits you're talking about? I've never received a bonus when depositing, unless you count the 1 token per million ISK deposited (also you get 1 token per million when exchanging winnings for more Blink Credit). The only other bonus you get for deposits is when you hit certain deposit milestones, like the 555m I got the other day for hitting 55.5b deposited. If by chance you're referring to the guy that was spamming Jita local saying Blink was offering double deposits, that wasn't a Blink employee, just another scammer or so.

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    1. I deposited 500M ISK, and got 50M ISK bonus for doing so. This was fairly recent - I just assumed it happened all the time.

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  3. What I'm honestly surprised is the source of this income: people who rather pay 220M for a Tengu than 166. I wish I could understand this weird form of stupidity.

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    1. Or like many people do; they need to subscribe their accounts, so instead of paying CCP directly they but GTC via the SOMER affiliate link. They get 200 (or 250) million in credit per GTC. They then use the GTC to extend their subscription and the bonus credit to buy all the tickets on a thing they want on SOMER Blink.

      Because you can pay for the PLEX in dollars at markee dragon (were the SOMER affiliate link takes you) and with how the Euro/Dollar conversion works out, you in addition can end up paying less for your game time then if you buy directly from CCP using just Euro's (if you keep an eye on the €/$ exchange rate and buy GTC for multiple months you most certainly will pay less and you'll often get enough bonus credit for like a "free" carrier or dreadnought).

      So not so stupid perhaps?

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    2. Unless SOMER has an ISK printing method (after the Ishukone Scorpion T20-gate they might have), SOMER can give out free credits, SOMEONE has to put in the ISK. It is very possible that SOMER don't make profit in ISK at all, they give out their ISK income as free credits to the real customers (the ones who pay them real money via affiliate links), but still, there has to be people who pay 220M for the 160M Tengu or there wouldn't be Tengu at all.

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    3. no sngle person buys it for 220m, its split down between eight people paying as it shows 27.5m each, so thats all they view it as

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  4. @Gevlon. It's the same reason why people gamble or participate in lotteries. They believe statistics happen to other people, they will get lucky or somehow influence the odds of winning?

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    1. Just like with IRL gambling though there are strategies for getting +EV out of SOMER Blink in the long run. Since most people (particulary those flush with ISK from other pursuits) won't care about that, then I think such gaps won't bother SOMER enough to close them down.

      Note that you shouldn't take the date on "Your Blink Statistics" at face value on whether or not you are successfully getting positive value, since those statistics use the inflated SOMER-official values for prizes rather than actual market rate.

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  5. Not enough math :-P

    Somer makes a lot of ISK if they can give away hundreds of millions ISK with GTC's, awards, mini-bonks and promo-blinks. Oh and their events when you can blow up Andrev Nox Jumpfreighter .

    I really like Somer, they financend my first Battleship, my first Pirate Battleship and my first lotterie addiction :-P

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  6. Stick to PvP, you are even worse at it than math.

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  7. According to this guy, SOMER only makes money on the Bonks and Minibonks. Thoughts? My issue is that this article only looks at ONE potential bet. Has anyone out there done as complete of an analysis on ALL the bets offered on SOMER Blink as the EVE Blink strategy guide I just linked has?

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