Yes, we're back. Although we're now officially in the market for a new host >.>  It's so sad because our current host used to be so good, but apparently they suspended the domain without bothering to inform us ... then unsuspended it when I chewed out tech support again without explanation (did they suspend by mistake?)

Now for the third time this month they claim that the problem is solved and won't repeat itself (Yeah right)

*sigh*

For those who need to be told still:

GAME ON!!!

Adding this to things I learned from running an internet company: Sex really does Sell.

So, last time I gave a run down of our advertising options and the relative effectiveness of each in our particular case. That essay ended with a ringing endorsement for Project Wonderful, and I got lots of queries for follow up information. Specifically people were interested in the types of ads we ran and exactly how one ad form compared in results to the other. So this is a follow up guide.

First off I'd like to start with some general guidelines for successful advertising, because it's not just about paying the big bucks to put your ad on the right site. There are lots of reasons why thousands of pageviews on Website X will not translate to thousands of clicks for your ad. If you stumble over the basics then you're just throwing your money away.

Obviously having a nice looking ad is key. Use good stock imagery. Sxc.hu can help you if you need to do this on the cheap, but for those who can spring for more an istock.com account is worth its weight in gold.

But this is more than just producing a PRETTY ad. When designing an ad, or when shopping through potential advertising spaces on Project Wonderful you have to keep in mind the overall composition of the ad WITHIN the page you're placing it on. Putting a black and white ad on a page that is predominantly black and white is much less effective than putting a colorful ad on that very same page. Contrast is key, you want visitor's eyes to go STRAIGHT to your ad.

That's something that has to be judged on a case by case basis really. The design process can (and often will) happen from both sides of the issue: sometimes I design an ad and then go find a site for it, sometimes I have a site already in mind and I design the ad specifically for that opportunity. The point is you should never have stock ads that you just plug in everywhere. You can have the prettiest ad ever made and the best placement on the site in question, but if the ad blends into the page you are screwed.

That brings us to another important issue: placement. Is bad placement on a high traffic site worth more than good placement on a low traffic site? Generally, no. Although I have come across some exceptions. Ideally you want "above the fold" placement. That is, you don't want people to have to scroll down to see your ad. Unfortunately for small time advertisers a lot of the best sites are not going to give you the top top ad spaces, so you will have to consider how far above the fold is okay and if you're bidding on a below the fold ad space ... how likely is it visitors are going to scroll down?

So personally, if the publisher has given the first skyscraper ad space to, say for example, Google and there's a second space directly below that, I might take it because on most monitors 25% of that second space will be above the fold. If the site is a good fit for the market I want to reach and the content will get the user to scroll down for sure, I can do something with that.

But how do you determine the likelihood that a visitor will scroll down?

Well ... did you scroll down when you checked out the site for the first time?

A lot of this is simply intuitive. It's again about page composition more than anything else. I have no problem with advertising below the fold on a webcomic for example, because users that read webcomics have to scroll either to read the end of the comic or to read the artist's blog comments below the comic. But I'm not going to advertise below the fold on a site where links to everything you could ever want or need are above the fold. Blogs are very much case by case. Does the blogger update multiple times a day, thereby forcing readers to scroll down to catch up? Or are there days and weeks in between bloggings so that even casual readers can peruse the new stuff without really scrolling down?

The last basic issue is ad size. When you first open up an account with Project Wonderful and try to create an ad they ask you to pick an ad size ... what to choose?

Do: Leaderboard, Skyscraper, or Rectangle if the opportunity is right.

Don't Bother With: Banners, Buttons, the dreaded 125x125 "Square"

In advertising, size does matter. Size really really does matter. Square formats are particularly useless because publishers tend to lump them together in ad quilts. If every ad is well designed and unique than that might work, but generally buying Square advertising space is cramming your ad into a noisy eye-sore.

I liked Project Wonderful so much I decided to expand the ad campaigns. Not all our ads worked (cause we're not nearly as smart as we pretend to be) so I thought it would be interesting going into detail about the individual campaigns, what worked and some thoughts on why they worked.

First Campaign: Split-Self, Premier.
Started this ad the week Split-Self premiered and it did pretty good. It ran on a variety of different sites, from Tokio Hotel Fiction, to Tales of MU, to webcomics like White Noise and Sore Thumbs and Wondermark. Since there weren't any options that hit on the exact market we wanted, we focused on sites that came close and offered page compositions that gave this particular ad maximum exposure. By far the best response was from Tokio Hotel Fiction which only gave us a .07% click through but that .07% stayed for an average of 5 mins on the site. The worst of this bid group was Sore Thumbs .04% click through, barely 30 seconds on the site. White Noise was somewhere in the middle, .11% click through 55 second on the site on average.

That's not to say either of those sites is a bad advertising opportunity. They just weren't as good a fit as we hoped for Split-Self

Incidentally I liked this ad so much I did another version of the imagery for a banner exchange I'm optimistic about (this is free program so it's really impossible not to be optimistic about it I guess)

Second Campaign: Fluffy-seme General.
This second campaign (Note the ad was resized to fit this page click here to see it's full size) did not do well at all. In retrospect I think the ad was too mysterious, too vague, not enticing enough and visually perhaps a bit too busy. Click through rates were not horrible, but we focused on writing sites and many of them did not have enough traffic to really maximize the advertising's cost effectiveness. Of these only Crystal Hall Forums gave us a okay performance with a .16% Click Through and 1 min on average on the site. The CRFH Forums gave us a 1.36% Click Through ... but 1.36% of 220 daily pageviews is ... 3. Three Clicks and they were gone so fast analytics can't even give us an average time.

Goes without saying, we pulled these ads after a week. Why waste your money on something that doesn't work when Project Wonderful makes it so easy to just do something else?

Third Campaign: Season in the Red Slashy.
Around this time I decided I wanted to run a campaign for Season in the Red. Now Season in the Red has an active fanbase already. Originally I had thought it better to focus on Split-Self because it's a baby and hasn't quite found its fans yet ... but at the same time we are having problems in the forum keeping activity levels up. And the more I explored the issue the more I realized that SiR fans all kind of ran in the same circles to begin with. So of course they weren't really hanging out in the forum, they were already hanging out on AIM and other forums all across the internet! So, I thought perhaps if we attract some fresh meat to the group that will help us sustain activity.

Season in the Red is about hockey players, so naturally the first instinct was to see what advertising was available in the sports section.

Ick, nothing good. Either the wrong sport or exceptionally bad placing. Waste of money right away. Didn't even bother.

A little background information. Season in the Red has no slash in it. Not in the actual story anyway. However since it's about the personal lives of young hockey players it does attract slash fans. This has never been a problem for me. In fact I LIKE the slash. I would also like to see SiR attract a more general market because I think it can, but what we have right now are the slash fangirls and I'm happy with that.

So when general sports failed, the natural next step was ... hey let's find the slash fangirls! So I pulled together this ad, sexually provocative in the right ways, visually appealing, got it up on June Manga, DMP Books and MangaBullet.

Jesus FREAKING Christmas!

Prior to this I've been talking ad effectiveness purely in terms of Click Through and Time on Site because these are the only stats we have for the campaigns. We haven't talked at all about Conversion Rates (that is visitors who come to site and sign up for an account) because it's really difficult for us to say. We'd got one or two sign-ups we couldn't identify as coming through from other efforts, but is this the advertising or is this just a lucky random websurfer?

This campaign made membership EXPLODE. Whenever our bids held the top spot we got a couple new sign-ups. I was pleased and amused and naturally wanted MORE :D

Campaign Four: Season in the Red, Even Slashier.
I designed a rectangle ad originally because I wanted to advertise on June Manga and MangaBullet and that's what space they had up for auction. I'm undecided about rectangle boxes, I think they sort of end up in weird places on layouts in general. But, even though June's space was way way below the fold, I felt these were good opportunities that warranted the experiment and it paid off.

Still there were other opportunities at different ad sizes, so I went for good old Skyscraper format next. This ad performed even better than the first. Many of the Skyscraper opportunities were cheaper, and we were able to get into Smack Jeeves hosted sites. I had never heard of Smack Jeeves, but as soon as I saw the number of Boy-Love comics they run I knew I wanted in. Advertising on the actual service page as been most useful a .3% click through equaling over 250 vists, 5.08 minutes on the site on average. The individual comic pages have been (so far) less successful, but still performing really really well.

It will be couple of weeks before we know for sure whether these new members will become active in the site. Some of them, presumably, are still working their way through Season in the Red's archive and may not become active until they've caught up with the story.

Campaign Five: Split-Self MOAR Vampire.
Moral of this story, change out ads often. Ads lose their effectiveness over time, but once you've found an advertising opportunity where people will click through and dig around your site for a couple of minutes ... you want to find a way to keep bringing people back. Rather than putting out new ads on new sites, I'm all for new ads on the same sites. Project Wonderful makes it so easy to create new ads and switch them out on current bids. So mix it up. Even the best ads loose effectiveness as people get used to seeing them and begin to ignore them. I loved our first Split-Self ad, but it was time to give it a break and put up some new eye candy.

Quick Note: that image is from sxc.hu ... proof that you do not have to pay for good stock, sometimes you can just get lucky.

Can't give you any stats on this one yet because it just started running. We'll see ... :)

More thoughts: Where should your ad direct?

As you can see, we ran a bunch of different stuff. Some directed to the main site, some directed to the story pages, some directed to specific content. If you remember my original essay, I said directing to content is better than directing to main pages. So far that still holds true here. Ads that directed to story pages performed better than ads that directed to the main page (obviously if you're only hosting one story on your site/blog this is not even an issue). There was no noticeable difference in performance when the ad directed to the First Chapter verses the Story Table of Context.

Closing Thoughts

Hope you found this more detailed break down useful :) Leave me a comment here with any questions or thoughts!

So as we've begun our first real big push into developing fluffy-seme into a profit making business that can cultivate and introduce a new crop of writing talent ... instead of just a hobby I do in my free time, we've tried various methods of promoting fluffy-seme and specific fluffy-seme series. I've just recently become aware of the LARGE community of writers big and small who do exactly what we do here (publish serials) through Wordpress and other devices and it seems to me everyone wants to know how to promote their stuff.

Since we have a bit of capital behind us (but not too much sadly -_-) I've decided to give you guys a run down of what we've done, the pros and cons of each program, and what worked best. May our experience be your guide :D

But first a little glossary for the unsavvy: Bounce Rates reflects the time a visitor spends on your site after clicking your ad on another site. In most stats it's presented in a cut and dry way: 90% means 90% of the people who visit your site don't even look at it, they just bounce right back. 30% means only 30% bounce. Obviously the lower this number, the better.

Conversion Rate is a more specific idea and not always measurable with traditional analytics (we're estimating here with scores of low medium and high). It's the number of visitors who, after clicking your ad, not only STAY but in fact become readers.

Got it? Good....

Facebook Ads

How it works: Text ads displayed all over Facebook, surely you've seen them.

How much it costs: Depends on what area you want to advertise. Ads to display to US users are high in demand and therefore run .45 ~ .70 per click. Ads targeted to users from other parts of the world though can be substantially lower .10 ~ .20 per click

Project we used it for: HyperLocal Story Scavenger Hunts

Conversion Rates: 0%

Bounce Rates: 0%

Cost/Benefit: We've only just started this campaign but so far no clicks, zero, not one ... which is alright cause at least we don't have to pay.

Conclusions: These kind of text ads are woefully ineffective as internet users are already so used to seeing them EVERYWHERE they no longer even pay attention to them. Facebook's program is useful because it lets you target users in extreme detail so at the very least when you DO get clicks you know that the person coming in is EXACTLY who you want. That's why we chose to run Facebook for HyperLocal, because we need advertising THAT specific (18-35, New York located, keywords scavenger hunts or geocaching), but if you're just looking for some general traffic this isn't even worth the time.

Google AdWords

How it works: Same idea as Facebook (or the other way around rather since Google was first) except scattered across millions of sites

How much it costs: Depends, there's a bidding system involved, popular keywords can get quite ridiculously pricey ($5.00 per CLICK?)

Project we used it for: N/A

Conversion Rates: N/A

Bounce Rates: N/A

Cost/Benefit: What turned me off was the feeling that Google was hustling me. I would enter in a keyword and a low bid and Google would refuse to activate my ad unless I raised my bid, even though there were NO OTHER bidders looking for that keyword. (huh?) Haven't used my AdWords account in a long time, so maybe they've added features and improved it but I got a notice about a class action lawsuit concerning the way they run this program a month or two ago ... so I doubt it.

Conclusions: Waste of time and effort for writers.

StumbleUpon Ads

How it works: I've written about this a lot in the past, because the program intrigues me and I sort of have a love/hate relationship with it. Basically SU ad system sends visitors you want to target directly to your site as they "Stumble"

How much it costs: .05 per visitor, but don't think of it as PPC because Stumble Upon has over 7 million users. If you target broadly and don't budget you can blow through $100 in a few hours.

Project we used it for: Season in the Red, Ugly Little Communist House, HyperLocal

Conversion Rates: Low

Bounce Rates: (Ridiculously) High ... 80% - 90%

Cost/Benefit: In a PPC world .05 per visitor is pretty cheap. We were able to bring down the insanely high bounce rates by directing people to actual content rather than the index page and we also raised our scores (nice advantage, SU ads are one the few ad programs where you get feedback from people who've experienced the ad)

Conclusions: Stumble Upon will pour traffic into your site like crazy, but it is also extremely expensive in the long run and with bounce rates so high it seems pretty pointless (this was the HATE phase of our relationship). At first it seemed to me to be a really good way to boost your Alexa ranking and not much else. Then I noticed a funny thing on our analytics. After a SU campaign had completed we saw a general increase in daily traffic and we continued to get the occasional referral from SU ... even though we were no longer paying. What happens (and this is where the LOVE part comes in) is that once Stumblers vote "I like this!" for your site it's thrown into the general Stumbling pool so that once the advertising is done people are still Stumbling on to your site but these are LEGIT stumbles. Now some may say you could just enter your site in for free, but the fact is it would get BURIED without people to vote it up in its category. Stumble Ads give you a steady flow of people who may vote your stuff up and therefore attract more (free!) Stumblers. After several rounds with SU this is what worked best (our guidelines if you will):

• Target as strictly as you can
  

• Have your Stumble Ads direct to actual content, not a main page or a splash page. Main pages are designed to give the visitor an immediate understanding of what they're looking at, a lot of Stumblers just want to go "YAY!" or "NE!" for the content and move on immediately (Stumble users are ADHD like that). So directing to the first chapter of your story is always better than directing to the table of contents because it makes them read the first few lines to figure out why they've Stumbled THERE.
  

• Have a daily budget because Stumble will burn through your cash like CRAZY
  

Project Wonderful

How it works: Banner ad bidding system for a variety of sites (mostly webcomic) You bid on an ad placement and only pay if you are the highest bidder.

How much it costs: Depends on the site and the ad placement, prices are clearly listed as per day but it's easy to be outbid before a full day is up. The general range though is $1 ~ $30 (yeah I know... huge range)

Project we used it for: Split-Self

Conversion Rates: 0% ... but then it's a little too soon to tell

Bounce Rates: Low/Medium

Cost/Benefit: Am I a bad person for getting so much pleasure from low balling the system here? Okay this is how you succeed with Project Wonderful, you pick out the sites you like and you check their 30 day bid price report. Then you bid just above the lowest amount as your max (in most cases $1 maybe $2 dollars) and place the bid for a long period (30 days) then you do this 10 more times for other sites of interest. Naturally you will be outbid very easily, but that's okay ... outbid you pay nothing, and when the ad that has outbid you expires or is pulled the system automatically goes back to yours which means you get cheap (sometimes even free) advertisting while you wait to be outbid again. We've gotten (so far) 60,000 impressions and 50 click throughs like this ... and we've only spent eight dollars. Eight dollars! That's .16 per click!

Conclusions: Love this program, looking to roll over some of fluffy-seme's advertising space to them real soon.

Launchly

How it works: To be fair, strictly speaking this is not really an advertising program. But we just tried it today and so far have gotten our money's worth so I'll write about it anyway. Launchly is sort of like a showcase for new web businesses. It invites people to rate your site and give you detailed feedback on its usability, design, the idea, etc. It also has some functions to help get the word out about your site through Twitter and such. (See fluffy-seme's listing here)

How much it costs: $40, but we got it at a discount because the program is new. This $40 for a month on the site BTW, no info about what happens to the listing after that point.

Project we used it for: fluffy-seme

Conversion Rates: 100% but probably not quality as it was people getting accounts to poke the system.

Bounce Rates: Low

Cost/Benefit: Within probably an hour we got a detailed analysis of this site that more or less RIPPED IT APART (but... in an encouraging way lol) and left us going "Wow ... we're dumb, why ARE we doing it that way?" so we changed a whole bunch of little stuff and ended up with something (I think) is actually much much better. So that alone was worth what we paid. We're already getting some Tweets about fluffy-seme and some general buzz from it too.

Conclusions: Overall I like this program a lot, although for most of you it will not fit your needs. I wouldn't use it for your blog or just a stand alone site for one serial.

Twitter

How it works: You follow bunch of people, tweet links to your stuff ... maybe they retweet, maybe you attract more followers

How much it costs: FREE!

Project we used it for: fluffy-seme, Ugly Little Communist House, Season in the Red

Conversion Rates: Meh ... Medium

Bounce Rates: 30%~ish

Cost/Benefit: You get as much from Twitter as you put into it, frankly. It also pays to be clever. I got the best response when I'd Tweet provocative/amusing quotes along with a link to the writing they came from on the site. Yes it works but no it's not easy.

Conclusions: Wish I had more time to devote to this. We should start a RT ring of web writers haha follow me @IsaKft

Crossposting

How it works: This is not a specific site. This is going out there, finding a community that matches the market you're after and crossposting there.

How much it costs: FREE!

Project we used it for: Season in the Red, HyperLocal

Conversion Rates: 80% - 90%

Bounce Rates: 20%

Cost/Benefit: So far all of our quality users have come to the site through this. And we didn't pay a dime for it.

Conclusions: It's the lesson of the internet I guess. It's a new medium so take advantage of it's features. A newspaper ad can't have a conversation with your market, a marketer on the internet (that would be you) can. We've put some money into HyperLocal advertising ... you know what's gotten the best response? Emailing the admin of the Geocachers New York meetup group and asking him to pass along the information. Best promotion we did for Season in the Red? Putting it up on hockey communities over LiveJournal. Crossposting can be dangerous territory, but the secret is to be part of the community or go through someone else who is. Don't just spam and run away.

----Things we haven't tried just yet Preliminary Evaluation

Facebook in General

Assessment: Will most likely be Twitter part II, the more you work at it the more benefit. Too bad we have so little time @_@

BlogAds

Assessment: Some good venues be EGAD! these ads just SCREAM low click through high bounce to me. (Plus they're are super ugly)

To be continued .... later ... I guess XD

Gagh @_@ work work work work The last few days have been a blur of actual productivity (imagine that).

• Split-Self has launched. If you didn't know that already XD The first chapter is up in the New Chapter section, if you like please join the Group and comment on it. It will probably take about four, five months for this little series to find its niche and develop a fan-base ... but I am ... slightly impatient XD XD XD XD
• HyperLocal sign-ups have begun. Remember to JOIN the Group because that way we can notify people easily on Aug 1st when the first game begins. Will it be possible to play if you're not in NYC? Maybe, depends how good you are with Google I guess
• We have another intern to help with the forum, Tiffani (actually we always had Tiffani I was just waiting for her to set up an account) Tiffani is involved with a site that will be of interest to some of you Gayauthors.org, her section of it, so come by and say hi in the forum :D

Oh our forums are sad and lonely and this will not do! So we've made some changes and we encourage you to come and check them out.

First off, I'm bringing in some interns because on top of writing, and working on everything else fluffy-seme needs I don't always have the time to keep an eye on the forum :( So RockChick231 is going to be helping me out. She's really cool, so stop by and say hi when you can :)

Second, I've got some fun for the forum. Here are some activities we're running to help kick things off:

• I'm selling myself XD XD XD Check out the Rewards shop where you can buy a fic request with points earned in the forum (by posting, replying, but also many many things on the site will earn you points. Click here for the full list.) Actually this probably should be called a fic DEMAND instead of a fic request option since you get to demand and I have to write. Anything goes. Anything. :)
• The first annual User Pic Icon Beauty Contest! This idea is insane and I love it XD Everyone should do it!

My business manager is a funny guy. He gave me this book to read and (presumably) implement into my business processes called "Getting Things Done". Today I had to tell him that I haven't had time to even start reading it ... I've been just way too busy ... getting things done XD

These are not the type of books I enjoy reading anyway, although I acknowledge that often when I *do* read them I find lots of valuable information. It's just ... mmm I'd much rather be DOING work than discussing how to do work. Even if my processes could use improvement.

Anyway, this is a week of stellar productivity, opened the HyperLocal subsite officially today, Split-Self hit 38 completed pages out of our 50 page pre-publication quota and therefore we've now set the series premier date of July 13th for it (hooray!) Those of you who haven't done so, check out the preview ... I'm REALLY excited about this one.

The first half of Saturday's Season in the Red is done, this is the beginning of a terribly fun chapter where a whole bunch of characters who were referred to in passing here and there in the story make their big appearances. So of these boys are UNBELIEVABLY slashy, so I know you guys will have fun with this. (oh and Season in the Red just got listed at the Web Fiction Guide. This is such a great site, the ultimate authority in online original fiction, stop by and give us a review!)

Oh if you haven't noticed, I've tweaked the layout/design a bit to make it clearer what fluffy-seme is about and how things work. Also added some sections to the forum. Plus there's been some behind the scenes interviewing and hiring that I'll talk about later.

All and all a SUPER productive week so far @_@ Stay tuned for more~~~

I measure community with two interlinked gauges. The first is the interaction between readers. When your readers argue, joke (even flame) each other they ensure that your blook/blog isn’t about you anymore - it’s about them. But we have to remember that reader-reader interaction is an inconsistent metric - there will be months where the discussions and arguments will be plentiful, and there will be months when nobody’s posting. This is normal, though entirely unhelpful - if you think community equals activity then you’re going to get one hell of a headache trying to cultivate a constantly high level of it.

The second gauge is interlinked with the first, and can be summarized with a few simple questions: do your readers talk about your site and the community of people around it? If so, what do they say? And how often do they do it? These questions touch on the intangible quality of ‘we’ness - the integral core of any group.

from Novelr

This is sort of a "YES YES THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANT!!!" moment here XD

There is literally a whole world of serial fiction writers and creators out there that I never knew existed @_@ It\'s been pretty freaky finding them all! This was an interesting article, starting this month we\'re going to be working on the community for fluffy-seme AGGRESSIVELY. I refuse to be defeated! XD XD XD

[Yet another installment in our In Soviet Russia... series, the facts behind the Season in the Red Story. See also the most recent installments on Soviet Players Coming to the NHL and Sovintersport]

Transnationalism, that is one entity with significant ties to two or more countries (political, economic, or legal), has existed for a long long time, but our modern era of convenient air travel and faster communications and general globalization has definitely made it an easier existence for everyday people to achieve. The NHL has always been transnational as the bulk of its teams are American while the bulk of its players are Canadian, but once European players started to really establish themselves here the transnational traffic of talent became truly insane. 

As time goes by hockey becomes more and more a transnational enterprise where national borders and laws are blurred and sometimes outright disregarded for the sake of the game. From time to time the State catches up with the players.

The most famous case happened in 1998 when Ulf Samuelsson was disqualified from Swedish national team. If the Czechs (who won the gold that year) had had their way, Sweden would have been stripped of all their points in the Olympic tournament and effectively thrown out, but the IIHF decided to treat the case like a doping case and, other than losing Samuelsson, the team suffered no consequences.

So what was the problem? Samuelsson, who had lived in the US for 13 years, had applied and received US citizenship. He did this because constantly traveling back and forth between the US for work and Sweden for the off season was a pain in the ass. US visas are difficult and expensive to get anyway, constantly having to reapply/renew them can be a nightmare. Many long time NHLers choose to get American citizenship just to simplify necessary basic business transactions. Unfortunately, Swedish law does not allow for dual citizenship. Once a foreign citizenship is acquired, the original Swedish citizenship is automatically renounced. Since Olympic players have to be legal citizens of the country they play for, Samuelsson was legally not allowed to be part of the Swedish national team.

But then there are also cases like Petr Stastny, who defected from Communist Czechoslovakia in 1980, became a Canadian citizen and started playing for the Canadian national team, before defecting (kind of) back when Czechoslovakia divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia to help Slovakia qualify for the Olympics. When Czechoslovakia divided the IIHF gave the top pool status to the Czechs, and left the Slovaks to work their way up from the bottom of the pool. Stastny eventually helped Slovakia go from the C Pool all the way up to the A Pool by 1996.

Or cases like Petr Nedved and Brett Hull. Nedved, played internationally as a junior for the Czech Republic, defected, became a Canadian citizen and played on Canada's 1994 Silver medal Olympic team only to then play again for the Czech Republic in the 1996 World Cup of Hockey. Brett Hull was born in Canada but raised in America for the most part. When he was cut from the Canadian national team ... the Americans quickly scooped him up then made him part of the World Cup team in 1996 that knocked Canada out!

[More from In Soviet Russia... our guide to the facts behind the Season in the Red story]

Sovintersport was set up by the Ministry of Sports (Goskomsport) in 1987 when it was becoming clear to practically everyone that an isolated planned economy was not working and that by trying to close itself from an increasing globalized world the USSR had landed itself in a position it maybe could not recover from. Despite the government's love of sports as a propaganda metaphor machine, sports programs were critically underfunded in the USSR and with the "reforms" of the eighties the Ministry was pretty much cut loose and left to its own devices, yet it remained an official part of the government for budgetary advantages:

By the mid-'eighties, Goskomsport was actually paying more in taxes to the Ministry of Finance than it was receiving from the state. Over the years, the Sports Committee had become an especially bountiful source of hard currency. After 1987, though, virtually no commercial opportunity was passed up, regardless of how deleterious it may have been either for the health of the athletes or for the larger needs of sports.

(from Serious Fun by Robert Edelman)

The opportunities that Goskomsport saw as commercially viable ranged from touring top teams such as CSKA and the national teams, to advertising and sponsorship rights, to the selling of athletes, to controlling the products and equipment that came into the country. Soviet athletes, for example, were famously only permitted to wear Adidas shoes because Adidas had locked up a sponsorship contract with Sovintersport first.

Probably the most controversial and profitable of Sovintersport's activities was its function as an agent for top Soviet talent looking to secure contracts with Western teams. The teams would negotiate with Sovintersport, pay Sovintersport and then Sovintersport would pay the athlete in question. In the NHL they tried, at least initially, to do this primarily through a third party (or at this point we should say a FOURTH party) a Canadian company called Intercan Sports.

"Priakin is on a budget," says Roman Dacyshyn, executive vice-president of Intercan Sports, the Canadian company that represents the Soviets. "The Flames pay the money to [Intercan] three times a year, and we divide it up. He gets pocket money. He gets a clothing allowance. Obviously, he needs more money for clothing now than he will later. We have to protect him. He can't go into a store and buy four suits just because the clerk says he needs them."

(from A Red-Letter Day by Crosbie Cotton)

An athlete's contract was split into three parts: a percent going to Goskomsport, a percent going to the club that developed the athlete in question and a percent going to Moscow. There are conflicting reports about exactly how this was broken down and its quite possible that there was no standard contract for these matters. Athletes were paid a month stipend that was-- even in the times-- ridiculously small.

This system fell apart very quickly because, while it was extremely profitable, Goskomsport did not have the ability to force athletes to deal with them exclusively and once exit paperwork was finalized and the athletes themselves got wise to the situation it was really just a matter of time before simple economics cut Sovintersport out of the deal. One prominent fight promoter explains:

I sit down and, lo and behold, Uri Vaulin sits down next to me. Vaulin, my secret weapon. The best of the Russian heavyweights. Six-foot-four, 225 pounds. A maverick. The Russians had kept him out of major competitions lately because they feared he would defect. Anyway, Vaulin tells me: 'Your deal makes no sense. None of us will fight for the money you're paying.'

'I told him I was paying Sovintersport $200,000 per fighter, for six fighters.

'He says: 'But we get only $900 a month. That's not bad for the Soviet Union, but we know fighters get more than that. I can get more than $900 just being a bodyguard.'

'See, I was to pay Sovintersport $1,200 per month per fighter for their maintenance, and what the people at Sovintersport were telling the fighters was that they would only get $900. My predicament was I thought I had a deal, but the fighters, it turned out, were free to make their own deals.''

(from Getting to the Main Event Becomes a Main Event by Phil Berger)

In the hockey world, this arrangement might have worked if Sovintersport had been able to coordinate its efforts with the rest of the government, withholding the necessary visa paperwork and tying about the athlete's business in bureaucracy if he went outside, but fortunately for the NHL stars the Communists weren't that great at working together and once they became Capitalists they were even WORSE at it. Also the draft kept Sovintersport from shopping top players around looking for the best price, so by 1991 or so the bottom fell out of the agency business for Sovintersport.

But that's where things get interesting. By 1992 the USSR is formally and completely dead and Sovintersport had therefore lost its charter as a government agency. Yet Sovintersport continued to exist until 1996, perhaps beyond, it's still registered as a business and was involved in a lawsuit in 2003 over shoes imported into the country (sadly not Adidas). It appears that it functions entirely as a private import/export business dealing with sporting equipment, but being that one of its original directors-- Sergei Chemezov-- left in 1996 for a very profitable political and private career it's hard to buy the idea that it is now a completely pedestrian commercial organization.