Money

Money, money, money

Money

Making money

Spending money

Playing quizbowl costs money. This money is used to pay writers, editors, 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 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.

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).

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.

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 than

The two options available to team leadership are to be a responsible 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" or "lowering the number of teams attending" should be made to make sure this suits your team.

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
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. Let's see the numbers.

Set pricing

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 has roughly 13 packets of 20/20, plus extra questions.

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 readers and scorekeepers; 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 $8.90/100 characters, which will ultimately be divided between the writing team and logistics arm of the organization.