Years ago I did metrics and promotions for Indie Comics as a hobby. My education was in Business Management and Analysis, and part of my work as a project manager was developing our internal tracking tools for costs and market analysis.

I'm retired now - but analysis stuck with me. Van Sciver is a bit of an unpleasant person, from my interactions with him, but one of the things he harped on was how much money he was making versus other indie comic book creators. He kept boasting about his sales on EBAY. I think around late 2024 October he claimed $1,000,000 a year from that. When I started poking around in the numbers and published my initial findings, he revised the claim down to approximately $300,000 a year.

My general thesis for a lot of public sentiment is that there is often some useful marker or some quality that we can measure if we can determine what it is. This is one of the reasons I've started tracking local grocery prices now - I'm curious if it will have some impact on local and state-level elections in my area in 2026.

For Van Sciver my thesis is that his audience has diminished, and he has exhausted the purchasing power of that existing audience. If the Ebay sales started picking up or slowing down that could give me some marker of sentimentality.

It also gives me a vehicle to expose a non-Hive audience to Hive, with a show don't tell mechanism.