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{{Money money money}}
Playing quizbowl costs '''money'''. This money is used to pay [[writer]]s, [[editor]]s, and tournament staff, as well as to cover other costs. This money can be raised by acting in this role or come from outside the community.

This guide was written by [[User:Kevin Wang|Kevin Wang]] and reflects their particular experiences, which may not apply to you - if you find some aspect of this article to be inaccurate, please suggest an improvement in the talk page so we can make this guide as useful as possible.

==Spending money==
There are costs associated with playing quizbowl. Let's take a look.

===Tournament fees===
The most pressing cost for the typical team is that each team sent to a tournament costs money.

It is worth remembering that regional tournaments are often a bargain, especially at the high school level. This is because quiz bowl is rarely focused on profit and does not always index to inflation - in some cases, fees have even dropped. The 2024 [[Princeton High School Tournament]] cost $85 for the first team and $75 for each additional one.<ref>[https://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28216 Princeton High School Academic Tournament (PHSAT) XXXI, 9/21/24] by [[ParanoidAndroid]] » Sun Aug 11, 2024 8:20 am</ref> The 2004 [[Princeton High School Tournament|PHSAT]] cost $100 for the first team and $80 for each additional one;<ref>[https://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1144 Announcement: Princeton High School Tournament - 11/20/2004] by [[DanTheClam]] » Mon Aug 09, 2004 5:53 pm</ref> - adjusted for inflation this is equivalent to $166/$132 in 2024.

This is less true for college sets: the main site of 2019 [[Terrapin]] cost $120 a team,<ref>[https://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22375 Terrapin @ UMD (3/2/2019)] by [[Noble Rot]] » Wed Feb 06, 2019 11:51 am </ref> while the 2004 [[Terrapin]] cost $80.<ref>[https://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1216 ANNOUNCEMENT Terrapin Invitational Tournament XVIII] by [[The Goffman Prophecies]] » Mon Sep 13, 2004 1:13 pm</ref>

===Transportation costs===
The most common mode of transport for tournaments is by car - there is rarely enough public transportation for teams to make it to the site by train or bus (though there are a few exceptions like the Amtrak from New Haven to Boston, which is regularly used by [[Yale]]).

If your team drives and you are not the one doing the driving, this may seem like getting your cake and eating it too. However, gas costs money! If you are a high school student being driven by a teammate's parent (or by your own) it is not necessarily expected that you pay them back for mileage, but such a gesture can only be appreciated.

===Buzzers===
:''Main page: [[Buzzers]]''
Buzzers cost money. The Anderson Officiator ten-buzzer system is generally considered to be the standard and starts at $320. All in-person tournaments require roughly one set of buzzers for every two teams in attendance.

==Not spending money==
Teams which have administrative support can often have some of their costs recouped. For obvious reasons, this can reduce the financial burden on your team and should be taken advantage of if possible.

While it is often necessary for high school teams to have faculty advisors due to the involvement of minors, it is rare for a high school extracurricular club to receive explicit funding.<!-- But don't take -->

It is hard to give concrete advice about what you can receive reimbursement for and how to get it, as the process will very greatly from school to school. Here is some general advice:
*The most important thing is to know what the rules are. It should be the responsibility of your team's management to learn what your school's policies are, and to maintain that knowledge.
*The sooner you know something, the better. Many schools require spending to be decided ''at the beginning'' of the semester/trimester/quarter and will not allow ad hoc expenses. Additionally, many will expect itemized costs and certainty about their magnitude. With the notable exception of nationals, this should not be a difficult expectation to meet: sets are generally announced a year ahead of their mirrors and have very consistent pricing structures.
**The corollary to this point is that '''if you are responsible for organizing a set or tournament, tell people information as soon as possible'''. While it may have little impact on you, delaying an announcement can have material impacts on teams that need to secure funding.
*Talk with your advisor about costs. In many cases the faculty member that advises your team can be an invaluable resource on administration and bureaucracy, especially as their tenure may span several undergraduate careers. However, this is not a magic bullet - it's probably just as likely that they're a rubber-stamp as a helpful resource.

For another perspective on this, see [[Ganon Evans]]'s guide on "[https://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=385278#p385278 A Guide on Club Finances]".

The two options available to team leadership are to be a responsible steward of your team's finances and take advantage of all available avenues to minimize costs for your team ''or'' to pay for everything out of pocket - to do something else, like force your team to incur unnecessary expenses, would be gauche, uncool, and decidedly not hip.

===A sample fall budget===
Here is a rough example of the sort of information you'd want to present your budgetary committee with. Dates, tournament names, and prices should be replaced before use.

The assumptions here:
* You are a college team capable of fielding two teams at ''some'' tournaments.
* You're planning on recruiting a bunch of new players, some of which will stick around.
* Your region has mirrors of every set being played that semester and your team is interested in attending each of them.
Obvious adjustments like "removing rows that don't apply" or "lowering the number of teams attending" should be made to make sure this suits your team.

{|class="wikitable"
! Date
! Item
! Cost
! Description
|-
| October X, 202X
| Novice Tournament @ University of Z
| $330
| Registration fees for three teams to attend novice tournament
|-
| October X, 202X
| ACF Fall @ Z State
| $600
| Registration fees for five teams to attend novice tournament
|-
| October X, 202X
| Transportation to ACF Fall
| $60
| Transportation costs to attend ACF Fall @ Z State
|-
| October X, 202X
| Penn Bowl
| $240
| Registration fees for two teams to attend regional tournament
|-
| October X or Y, 202X
| Fall Tournament
| $240
| Registration fees for two teams to attend regional tournament
|-
| November X, 202X
| ACF Winter
| $300
| Registration fees for two teams to attend regional tournament
|-
| November X, 202X
| Transportation to ACF Winter
| $60
| Transportation costs to attend ACF Winter
|-
| November X, 202X
| Winter Tournament
| $240
| Registration fees for two teams to attend regional tournament
|-
|colspan=2| Total
| $2070
|
|}

Things to note:
* The budget for "Novice Tournament" and ACF Fall have been drawn up with the assumption that many of your new recruits will want to attend. Indeed, all the tournaments have budgets that reflect the best-case scenario of your team. When choosing numbers, it is best to '''be optimistic but realistic''' - feel free to oversell attendance slightly but don't say anything ridiculous.
* Several of these tournaments have placeholder names and/or placeholder dates. Often times the precise date and order of tournaments in your area will not be known in advance - it is better to have something in place which you can then move or use a generic name to ensure that you secure funds.
* The item descriptions are short and give the number of teams attending, but not much else. The budgetary committee will not know what a "2.5 dots set pinned to 2023 Penn Bowl" is, nor will they care; tell them enough for them to understand why you need the money and nothing more.
*A few capped transportation items have been included. Whether transportation is paid for will vary from school to school, as will the specific nature of what qualifies as reimbursable travel and how much will be given. Make sure to investigate whether travel to regular season tournaments can be reimbursed, as well as whether travel to nationals will be (as they are often very different in nature).
* As this is a fall budget, no considerations have been made for nationals - that is a much more complicated situation.

The main assumption here is that most budgetary committees will be reasonable bodies with bigger fish to fry than the quizbowl team, and that if they have questions they will ask you for clarification. As such, providing a straightforward budget that will look insignificant next to, say, your school's sailing team can go a long way.

==Making money==

Quizbowl is a game with that provides players with competitive depth and writers with space for both rigor and creativity. As a direct consequence of this, it is a ''terrible way'' for the average person to make money - the focus should thus always be on the volunteer ethos and doing something enjoyable to earn money. Let's see the numbers.

===Part-time job===
This section is not meant to advocate for players to pick up a job to pay for quizbowl - rather it is meant to be a concrete reference point for "money earned" versus "time spent".

The average salary of a McDonald's employee is '''$13/hour''' and the threshold for part-time work is 20 hours a week. Someone who works a part-time job for two months over the summer will make roughly $2080 for 160 hours of labor. Someone who worked an equivalent amount of time at the federal minimum wage of $7.50/hour would make $1,160.

===Writing a housewrite===
A typical high school [[housewrite]] has a [[mirror fee]] of $15-20 a team. Sets intended for lower [[difficulties]] tend to be cheaper, while those with harder questions can be up to double the cost. Discounts are often provided for sites which provide complete statistics. A typical [[set]] will have roughly 13 [[packet]]s of [[20/20]], plus extra questions.

2023 [[Planetfall]] had 293 teams play across 23 mirrors. At a base mirror fee of $17/team, this amounts to approximately $4981 gross. There were 6 editors and 12 writers on the team - assuming a 50:50 split between writers and editors and that every member of the team contributed equally then each editor made $415.08 for editing 43.3/43.3 and each writer made $207.54 for writing 21.7/21.7.

The set had 13 packets of 20/20 for 260 tossups and 260 bonuses meaning each one was worth $9.58 minus other costs. Assuming very generously that every question took 20 minutes to write and 10 minutes to edit then the set took 260 man-hours, each editor earned $28.73/hour, and each writer - '''$14.37/hour'''.

These numbers look pretty good but it is important to consider the assumptions and the background:
* This is a highschool set, meaning it charges lower mirror fees than college sets. This is roughly made up for by the much-larger audience - 2024 [[ARCADIA]] charged $50 per team but had a total field of 88 teams, meaning Planetfall still outgrossed it. However, note that Planetfall was a very successful set and almost certainly represents the higher end of how much a set can make.
* The net would be lower if the team paid logistics members, proofreaders, or for advanced stats or if they paid staff at an online mirror out of pocket (which is more common for college sets), but this would take off at most 5%.
* It seems unlikely that editors would take a larger fraction than 50%, so if anything the money made by writers should be slightly better.
* A uniform spread of the distribution is not uncommon for editing (though Planetfall actually had one editor take 11/11 and another take 1/1). In contrast, writing usually follows a Zipf distribution; also, editors can often double-dip and also write. However, these only affect total compensation and not the per-hour wages.
* The numbers for being an editor are hard to judge. As previously mentioned, many editors do a substantial amount of writing that may not require any explicit time to "edit" - additionally, a strong writer core can reduce an editor to a mere rubberstamp (and a well-paid one, at that). However it is also possible that an editor may choose to or be obligated to spend a lot of time on every question, like in mentorship-focused sets like [[PADAWAN]] and [[WORKSHOP]].
* By far the worst assumption is ''the time taken to write questions.'' It is possible to achieve the assumed rate of 20 minutes a question but this usually requires (i) a very fast (likely experienced) writer (ii) producing low-difficulty questions (iii) for a shorter format like [[NAQT]] (iv) with preselected answerlines. A slow person producing hard questions from scratch will go much, much slower - anecdotally I (Kevin) often took several hours per question while editing for Nationals - but a more reasonable rate for a newer writer of easier questions might be 45 minutes each. Using this number a writer's compensation slips well below minimum wage:

{|class="wikitable"
!Time to write one question
!Equivalent hourly wage
|-
|20 min
|$14.37
|-
|25 min
|$11.50
|-
|30 min
|$9.58
|-
|35 min
|$8.21
|-
|40 min
|$7.18
|-
|45 min
|'''$6.39'''
|-
|60 min
|$4.79
|-
|75 min
|$3.83
|-
|90 min
|$3.19
|-
|}

As a reminder, these numbers are based on Planetfall, which had a very high mirror count of 23. A high school housewrite can receive as low as 2 mirrors if aimed at Nats-minus difficulty, with the median lying closer to 12. Here's what the numbers look like if one takes that same 45 minutes per question benchmark and scales down a set's profits:

{|class="wikitable"
!# of mirrors
!23
!21
!19
!17
!15
!13
!11
!9
!7
!5
!3
!1
|-
!Hourly wage
|$6.39
|$5.83
|$5.28
|$4.72
|$4.17
|'''$3.61'''
|$3.06
|$2.50
|$1.94
|$1.39
|$0.83
|$0.28
|}

This implies the median writer probably makes about $3.61 an hour while working on a set. It is entirely possible to be make less than $1 an hour if a low number of tournaments mirror the questions and it takes longer than 45 minutes to write each question.

===Case study: OQL===
The existence and continued popularity of other [[trivia formats]] is a useful point of comparison for the quizbowl community. This example will focus on [[OQL]] US (the American branch of the Online Quiz League), which is one of the more popular competitions in the space.

Some important differences which makes OQL significantly more profitable than quizbowl:
*The main audience is adults, whose income allows them to pay significantly more for their hobbies (like trivia).
*Questions categorically do not aim to be [[pyramidal]], which has the effect of making them shorter. The closest comparison in most cases would be a single bonus part.
*The total number of questions is lower, even before accounting for differences in format - 8 directed questions for every member of two teams of four plus four extras is 68 questions a round. Across 11 rounds a season, that makes a total of 748 answers.
*The games are played as asynchronous rounds in online rooms using volunteer [[reader]]s and [[scorekeeper]]s; this removes the costs of both hosting and staffing.
*There is a single organization producing questions, meaning that it can take advantage of economies of scale and also concentrate the profits.

The aggregate of these factors is that the writers are writing a smaller number of shorter questions for more money and less overhead.

Some numbers:
*The 11th season of OQL US had 120 teams in 9 divisions. This is on par with a set getting 9 mirrors with 12 teams a piece, which would be quite good for a median housewrite, especially at the college level.
*Week 6 of season 11 of OQL US had an average of about 181 characters per question (12,258 total). For comparison, questions that [[NAQT]] intends for middle schoolers are over twice as long and have additional requirements like being pyramidal.
*The base entry fee for OQL is $100 for returning teams - that means the gross take for season 11 was roughly $12,000. The fact that there are no costs associated with hosting means that all of this money also goes to the production team, rather than just the mirror fees.

This boils down to a unsplit rate of $16.04/question or $8.90/100 characters, which will ultimately be divided between the writing/editing team and the logistics arm of the organization. If it's assumed only a third of a question's value is awarded to a writer working at a slow pace of 30 minutes per question, this easily comes to $10 an hour. Unlike our other examples this is a conservative estimate, as it is much more feasible to write at this pace or faster when producing OQL questions due to how short they are.
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===The importance of the volunteer ethos===
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