There are some really good posts in here (obviously @
Profess with a stellar overview).
Maybe it was addressed, but what are we basing this fall from grace on?
Fan enjoyment? Preference of recent/upcoming battles?
Only reason I'm asking is that the KPI of opinion doesn't really hold much weight when running a business.
(A lame example is looking at the net worth of celebrities. Ben Affleck has made a number of horrible movies in the last couple years. Matthew Mcconaughey has chosen much better projects to work on and won the hearts of new fans and the awards for his role, Affleck’s net worth is higher than Mcconaughey’s…)
When you look at the battles released this year, RBE hands down wins from an avg. views perspective (all of their battles released are 100k+, KOTD has about 7 released since the start of the year that achieved 100k+, which reflects less than 50% of their battles).
However if you look at total views (just for battles, not all content) in the last 7 months, KOTD has 3.1M and RBE has 2.6M.
If we judge a business by their ability to make money, does youtube pay more based on the average views per video OR do they pay by total views (I don't know the details to this btw, from my understanding it IS total views but I could easily be proved wrong).
Basically, an advertiser doesn't necessarily care if Sno vs. Times was a "classic" or not...
It goes without saying that RBE's Mook event is arguably the best event of the year (maybe not arguably at this point), but what is the ROI that they are expecting from this?
It's going to be great for the fans of battle rap, but is the event going to make money? Either RBE has an outside investor OR ARP is going all in. If the event sells out with thousands of people in the venue, if they get tens of thousands of PPV’s, if the YouTube views propel each battle to a million plus, and their subscribers goes up 10 fold, this could be a highly profitable event. But is all that going to happen? Would you invest in a company that was investing heavily in themselves or a company that was playing it safe but had been sustainable for 10yrs?
At the end of the day, competition has made battle rap better imo. Smack events have gotten more interesting, more leagues pop up with new innovative ideas/battles, which means the biggest leagues have to adapt. Is the Mook battle more exciting than the Diz v. Oxxi battle, maybe. Will it make as much money? Probably not.
If KOTD stops throwing events and Organik goes back to a 9 to 5 job in order to fund Joey Gambello vs. Arcane in front of 9 silent white kids in Toronto, it's safe to say their business is failing.
But in terms of RBE, I'd wait to see if Arp can even continue after (seemingly) going all-in on an event.
At the end of the day, I agree with most of the comments in here. My personal feeling is that competition benefits the fans the most so I'm happy with however this works out. I'm just not sure if KOTD has fallen off as hard simply due to a lack of "classics"
Additionally, KOTD produced Frak v. Brixx this year. Which is the greatest battle of all time. So there's that.
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