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A significant portion of the revenue comes from licensing products. If we're able to build the popularity of the trademarks to the point of today's really popular icons, they're worth 7% to 10% of retail. Distributors are willing to pay that load for things like "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" because the increase in sales makes it worth it. To make a trademark that popular, we need stories and characters to go with it.
That's why we want to get Artemis Magazine started, and then expand the project into more capital-intensive forms of story-telling. This approach is popular because at the same time we're building a familiar setting, we're showing everyone what it might be like to live on the moon and build an industrial base there. At every step along the way the people who are paying for it receive immediate value for their money in the form of the products and entertainment they've purchased.
Take the "Moonbase Artemis" coffee cups, for instance; if you have one at the office and one at home it's fun to look at the picture and daydream about life in Mare Crisium. It helps to know that $.75 of the $7.50 paid for each of them went to the space flight division. From a consumer standpoint, it is nice to know that a portion of the profit from the sale of any product advertising itself as a sponsor of the Artemis Project will go to build the moon base.
Extrapolating this approach back to Gene Roddenberry and the early days of Star Trek is instructive, but we need to adjust the scenario just a bit. In this alternate universe, Roddenberry would not have invested all the early profits from Trek in building moonships; he would have only invested the margin he could afford. He might have guessed how much his sales increased because he had a real space project going and made sure no more than that was spent on spaceship parts. The remainder of the profit needs to be reinvested in building the industry that provides those extra profits, so the solid financial base is there.
This is the financial puzzlement we are facing right now. What is the value of being sponsor of the Artemis Project? Since we don't have any historical data to go on, all we can do is compare our plan to what people have done in other areas.
Back to the coffee cups for a moment: 10% is a very high rate to pay for the trademark; right now the Artemis Project trademark might be worth about 3% to 5% of retail to an external supplier. It can't be much more than that because other companies have to explain to their customers why their sponsorship of the project is a good thing. This will change as we grow and the project becomes more well-known.
If anyone has data which might be applicable to this analysis, please share them if you can ethically do so. Every little bit of data helps more than you can imagine.
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