Converting ISFL Dollars to US Dollars
I’m sure we’ve all thought about it before. It’s a simple question, but I’ve never seen anyone try to answer it before. At least, I’ve never seen anyone take a *legitimate* stab at answering it. In this article, I’m going to look at several methods of converting ISFL money into US dollars. Each of these methods will almost definitely produce wildly varying results, but I still think it will be fun to explore these different conversion rates. Here are the methods that I’ll be exploring, so if you’d rather not read the entire article, you can at least skip to certain methods that seem more interesting to you.
Method 1 - Graphic Artists
I’m going to have a couple of friends, Jango and ThunderTitan, time themselves on their next three graphics, see how much money they make for each one, extrapolate that out to an hour, and then compare that to the average graphic designer’s hourly wage. I had them each do three graphics while timing themselves, and then let me know the grade that they ended up receiving. In no order, the times that they logged, along with the grades, the payout, and the amount that each graphic made per hour, are as follows:
Graphic 1: 1 hour - 5/7 - $2,000,000 - $666,667 per hour
Graphic 2: 4 hours - 4/7 - $1,500,000 - $375,000 per hour
Graphic 3: 10 hours - 6/7 - $2,500,000 - $250,000 per hour
Graphic 4: 5 hours - 5/7 - $2,000,000 - $666,667 per hour
Graphic 5: 3 hours - 5/7 - $2,000,000 - $666,667 per hour
Graphic 6: 2 hours - 5/7 - $2,000,000 - $666,667 per hour
Average - $548,611 per hour
This would mean the average pay per hour for these two ISFL graphic artists is $548,611. I have a slight hunch that this may be a bit higher than the average United States based graphic artist makes per hour, but let’s check. According to Payscale, the median pay for graphic artists in the U.S. is $29.37 per hour. That’s a bit of a gap, albeit an expected one. Now let’s use these numbers to give ourselves a conversion rate between ISFL dollars and U.S. dollars, based on average graphic artist income.
Conversion Rate 1: 548611 / 29.37 = 18,679.30
There is our conversion rate - $18,679.30 ISFLD for every $1 USD
Now that we’ve got that, let’s move on to our next method!
Method 2 - Surveying
With this method, I’m going to be asking some randomly selected ISFL members how much IRL money they would pay to get $50m in ISFL money. I’m not planning on getting a very large sample size for this one, which isn’t the greatest, but I’m sure that it won’t be a huge deal for an analysis about fake money in a fake league. Also, I’m only going to contact users that I know at least a little bit, because my social anxiety won’t allow me to send strangers messages about this stupid media. Yes I know, that isn’t very objective, but it will have to do for our purposes.User 1a: $20
User 2a: $0
User 3a: $25
User 4a: $25
User 5a: $0
User 6a: $40
User 7a: $1
User 8a: $0
User 9a: $10
User 10a: $10
Average Purchase Price: $13.10
As you can see, the average amount of USD that people will pay for $50 million ISFLD is a measly $13.10. That means that our conversion rate for this method is going to be quite a bit different than our first method. Let’s math it out.
Conversion Rate: 50,000,000 / 13.1 = 3,816,793.89
$3,816,793.89 ISFLD for every $1 USD. That is a pretty big difference when compared to method one. No one method is correct though, so that’s why we’re using multiple methods, and then averaging them all out! Let’s move on.
Method 3 - Surveying 2
I’m going to do a similar thing as above, except I’m going to ask a different set of users how much they would *sell* $50m in ISFL money for. I expect that I’ll get a pretty different amount compared to method two, even though it’s just a slight variation.User 1b: $100
User 2b: $50
User 3b: $100
User 4b: $50
User 5b: $100
User 6b: $30
User 7b: $10
User 8b: $5
User 9b: $5
User 10b: $55
User 11b: $100
Average Selling Price: $55.00
Oops, I accidentally asked eleven users this survey and only asked ten in the last survey. Oh well, a slightly larger sample size probably isn’t a bad thing. The range here is much larger than the range in the first survey, which is interesting to me.The first survey ranged from $0 to $40, while this one ranges from $5 to $100. Our average was *much much* higher than the last survey as well. There is probably a psychological, sociological, or economical reason for this that is more than just “greed”, but we won’t dive into all that in this media. I don’t blame these people for having such higher selling prices than the other group’s purchase prices. Gotta do what you gotta do for that bag, you know?
Conversion Rate: 50,000,000 / 55 = 909,090.91
$909090.91 ISFLD for every $1 USD. This is still much higher than method one, but it’s still nearly 4x lower than method 2.
Method 4 - Podcasting
This is an easy one. I’m going to look at the podcasting rate in the ISFL, and compare that to an average wage of a professional podcaster in real life. The rate for a podcaster in the ISFL with the current media grading payouts is $4,000,000 per hour. This is very clearly going to be larger than the real life rate, but like I’ve said before, that’s to be expected. The average hourly wage for a professional podcaster in real life, according to www.wnycstudios.org, is $37 per hour.Conversion Rate: 4,000,000 / 37 = 108,108.11
$108,108.11 for every $1 USD.
Method 5 - Bank Account Size
In this method we’re going to look at the average ISFL bank account size and compare that to the average balance of an American bank account. According to www.valuepenguin.com, the average bank balance of an American *household* is $10,545. This isn’t the best comparison, since it’s a household amount, rather than an individual’s amount. But as I’ve said multiple times in this media, this is an article about fake money in a fake league, so it’ll do. Originally, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get the average ISFL bank account size, but I found a way that was extremely easy. I went to the banking “spreadsheet”. I put it in quotes because it’s actually a doc, which means we aren’t able to make a copy of it to go manipulate it for our own purposes, such as this. Anyway, I went to the banking spreadsheet, and then I went into the dev tools, specifically the HTML inspector. I noticed that every cell in the sheet (while looking at the “Players” tab) had the s46 class. Boom, there’s my ticket. I switched over to the console, where I could programmatically get information from the page through javascript. Here’s the tiny chunk of javascript that I wrote that gave me exactly what I needed.let elems = document.getElementsByClassName("s46");
let amt = 0.00;
let i;
for (i = 0; i < elems.length; i++) {
amt += parseFloat(elems[i].innerHTML.replace("$", "").replaceAll(",", ""));
}
console.log(amt / elems.length)
The first line gets every “element” on the page that has the s46 CSS class. The second line instantiates a variable that I’ll use to store the total amount of the bank accounts combined. Line three is a counter variable that I could use in the for loop below. Line four is called a for loop. What it’s doing is looping over and over again, until it reaches the amount of elements that I got from the page, which was well over a thousand. Inside the loop, I’m adding the amount of the current bank account that the code is looking at to the amt variable. I wasn’t sure if it would be capable of adding together a value that included a dollar sign and commas, so I used the built in “replace” and “replaceAll” functions to strip the dollar sign and commas out of the value before it’s added, and I also used the built in parseFloat function to make sure it wasn’t just concatenating 1000+ strings together. The very last line is what actually showed me the average, or total $ amount divided by the number of elements. I get excited any time I see a real world (or sim world) use for my programming skills, so this was fun for me lol.
Press enter, and it spits my answer out immediately.
Conversion Rate: 14,226,830.62 / 10,545 = 1,349.15
$1349.15 ISFLD for every $1 USD.
Method 6 - Banking Salary
This is a simple method. We’re just going to compare an IRL bank teller to an ISFL banker. ISFL bankers make $6 million per “year”. According to Glassdoor, an IRL bank teller makes around $30k per year on average. That gives us everything that we need for a conversion rate!Conversion Rate: 6,000,000 / 30,000 = 200
$200 ISFLD for every $1 USD. This is easily our lowest rate yet.
Method 7 - Commissioner Salary
In this section, we will compare the one and only Bex to other sports’ commissioners! As the ISFL commissioner, Bex makes $7 million per season. This is in addition to the $13 million that ISFL Head Office members receive each season. This obviously means that she makes $20 million per “year”. According to www.usatoday.com, Roger Goodell (commissioner of the NFL) makes $40 million per year. He also gets access to a private jet, so Bex is going to need to step up her salary negotiations, apparently. Rob Manfred, the commissioner of the MLB, makes $11 million per year, according to www.investopedia.com. Adam Silver, who is the commissioner of the NBA, makes $10 million per year according to investopedia. These are the three biggest leagues in the country, so I think it’s fair to average them out, even though two of them are commissioners of different sports. Average IRL Commissioner Salary: 40,000,000 + 11,000,000 + 10,000,000 = 20,333,333.33
Conversion Rate: 20,000,000 / 20,333,333.33 = 0.98
$0.98 ISFLD for every $1 USD. Wow, this is almost a one to one rate. I’d say that Bex is fairly compensated, at least according to these numbers!
Method 8 - Twitter Influencers
Twitter is a popular way that ISFL users make money in this league. We’re able to make up to $800k per week. Multiply this by 52, and that shows that we make $41,600,000 per year. That seems pretty hefty. Maybe we shouldn’t use that number. Instead, let’s use a “league year” instead of a full year, since a league year is supposed to simulate one real world year. It’s fairly commonly accepted that a league year is *around* two months. So let’s take $800k and multiply that by 8, to give us two months of Twitter pay. That winds up being $6,400,000 per “year”. According to Fox business, Twitter influencers can make anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000. Let’s just take the average, which is $65,000.Conversion Rate: 800,000 / 65,000 = 12.31
$12.31 ISFLD for every $1 USD. Not too far off from the last method!
Method 9 - Economic Columnist
I’m going to time how long this whole media takes, then use the media grading sheet to figure out how much money I’ll make from this article, and then compare that to an average wage from a comparable real life job, that I haven’t decided on yet. Well, this is the last thing that I’m writing before calling this complete. Right now, the clock is at right about 3 hours, so we’ll just call it that to make things easier. According to the media payout spreadsheet, I should make about $3,899,280 from this article. That means that my “hourly rate” is $1,299,760 per hour. A journalist is a similar job, I suppose, and they make $49k per year, at least according to ZipRecruiter. Let’s convert that to hourly so that we can compare it to my “hourly rate”. That puts the journalist’s hourly rate at $23.56 per hour. Time for the conversion.Conversion Rate: 1,299,760 / 23.56 = 55,168.08
$55,168.08 ISFLD for every $1 USD. We’re finally done!
Conclusion
For the conclusion, I think that we should average all of the conversion rates that we’ve found so far, and then we can just call that our final conversion rate.Final Conversion Rate: (548,611 + 3,816,793.89 + 909,090.91 + 108,108.11 + 1,349.15 + 200 + 0.98 + 12.31 + 55,168.08) / 9 = 604370.49
And there we have it. $1 USD is worth exactly $604,370.49 ISFLD. Thank you for reading. This was a fun little project, and I hope that you guys enjoyed it!