Question for SBF

by Fisherman 192 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  slimboyfat

  sparky1 are you saying they didn't make a lot of money from the literature? From your figures they sold around 10 million Watchtowers per issue at 20c each. Double it to include Awake! (Slightly fewer Awakes! printed but I rounded the Watchtower figure down anyway) That's 20 million copies, 24 times a year. I make that just under 100 million dollars from magazine sales alone per year. Say production costs were as much as half of that, that's 50 million dollars profit from magazine sales alone.

  Subscriptions didn't make a lot of money but they clearly weren't a loss. Because when the charge was dropped, subscriptions were dropped pretty quick too. Watchtower was not in the business of handing stuff out for nothing in return.

  On top of that you had book sales, including quality hardcover reference books, Bibles, tapes, videos, calendars and everything else in the 1980s.

  Plus my memory is that publishers would sometimes pay for the magazines themselves and give the money from householders to the world wide work in addition. I can also remember that householders would sometimes pay more than the cover price for the literature because it seemed so little.

  Watchtower made its money not by charging large amounts, but through sheer scale.
• 

  _Morpheus

  Which is why its done on a congregation level. No need to monitor individuals. As long as someone gives the required amount its all good. As for penalties... my old congregation missed the mark one month. A letter (email) from the branch followed immediately as well as a call from the CO. The difference was made up very quickly . Cult FOG is very strong and no real action needs to be taken to be effective. No whole congregation is going to rebel and not donate the mandatory coerced donation just like on the circuit level. And congregations that simply cant... we have already seen what happens. They contract.
• 

  sparky1

  First of all shepherdless, you are beclouding the issue by NOT following my line of reasoning and introducing a counter argument based on a date that you choose. Slimboyfat stated that the 1970/80's were WATCHTOWER's 'heyday' (so to speak) and was the "all time boom in Watchtower sales." To be FAIR to slimboy, I went right to the middle of his DATE claims and chose 1980 as the halfway point between 1970 and the end of the 1980's. I took my data from that year as a 'mean' (although not purely scientific) to counter his argument. Using your form of reasoning, I could go back to the early 1970's and show that they were making even less money then because they produced even less magazines. But lets go with your $2,000,000.00 a week for the sake of argument. That's still only (and I say that with a grain of salt) $104,000,000.00 a year in revenue from publications and that does not take into account the cost of producing and shipping the literature. That is GROSS sales before the 'cost of doing business' is figured in.
  
• 

  _Morpheus

  Which is absolutely zero profit, sparky. The rags were a means to an end, a way to fleece jws and give them busy work, maybe pick up some converts along the way.
• 

  slimboyfat

  So the "sanction" is they send a letter to the congregation and hope that anonymous donations increase. Good luck with that.
• 

  sparky1

  "Sparky1, are you saying that they didn't make a lot of money from their literature?" - slimboyfat

  I never made any such a claim. Anywhere at any time.

  "The Watchtower has lost it's MAIN (italics and bold mine) source of income from book publishing, and failed to find a substitute. In some ways JWs were extremely fortunate as a religious denomination that had a lucrative publishing empire as its support."- slimboyfat

  I am trying to counter your claim that the revenue from the publications was their main and lucrative source of income. $50,000,000.00 a year is hardly the MAIN source of operating revenue for an organization as large as WATCHTOWER.
  
• 

  shepherdless

  Hi Sparky, I am fairly sure that the origins of sbf's comments on the money earnt go back to the following old thread:

  https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5260919340793856/bcg-matrix-jw-org-production-model

  At least that is how I understood it. I think sbf mis-remembered the relevant date period (it was early 80s, not 1970/80s). I mis-remembered it myself, as 1985, and as $2mil per week, not $1.7 mil per week.

  Morpheus, as long as it was properly managed, it can't have been zero profit. We were getting 100 page broadsheet newspapers delivered to our door for around that price, at around that time, and the newspapers were seen as profitable.

  Another way to look at it is that even if you argue that those bethelites working under sweatshop conditions were only making the Borg $100 million p.a. revenue (1980s $) back then, now you have even more bethelites producing a website that earns the Borg diddly squat.
• 

  _Morpheus

  I admit a certain level of hyperbole but the profit wasnt great enough to be considered their main source of income. The rags are for believers. They are not directly analogous to newspapers. As for more bethelites producing a web page..? Really, more required to make a web page than print and ship hard (physical) literature? I’ll let you think about that position for a while before i bother responding
• 

  closed

  I think the org is doing just fine financially.

  1. They have dropped much of production. They outsource a lot (DVDs etc).

  2. They have donations coming in.

  All in all: Even if donations are wors, the regular spendings are lower.
  
• 

  sparky1

  "Newspapers were seen as profitable." - shepherdless

  Newspapers made their money from advertising. Watchtower and Awake NEVER had the luxury of income from advertising.