*How much media does a max-TPE career take?

[Troen]

Will Troen ever write an article that doesn't end its title with a question mark?

Not today!

As (I presume) everyone knows, acquiring all possible TPE for your player requires more league monies than anyone is likely earn from their salaries from the team.  I explored this a bit in a past article, concluding that a typical player requires $21.5 million per season to max earn.  Going in a different direction now, I'm going to look into what the shortfall that you need to make up in an entire career looks like as well as what that looks like when turned into media efforts.  This is partially selfish because I was actually wondering it myself but I figured other people could be interested in the results.  I have tried to cover all kinds of media I saw payout rules for, but it's possible that I missed some obscure ones.

Total Salary
I'm going to assume that our example player max earns TPE while signing minimum contracts and including salary adjustment clauses for the player's regression years, aka the minimum amount of salary possible to get.  I'm going to assume that players do not start at the trade deadline in the DSFL since it's close to a wash.  I'm also assuming that the player is called up to the ISFL after getting drafted (vs staying in the DSFL for an additional year, which technically would cost the team less due to the first $4 million of DSFL salary not coming from the ISFL team's cap and would allow the player to earn $3 million more salary).  That works out roughly to

Year 0 (DSFL) - $6 million
Year 1-3 (rookie contract) - ~250 TPE, $1 million/year
Year 4-6 - ~750 TPE, $3 million/year.
Year 7 - ~1450 TPE, $5 million
Year 8 - ~1300 TPE post-regression, $5 million
Year 9 - ~1150 TPE post-regression, $5 million
Year 10 - ~850 TPE post-regression, $4 million
Year 11 - ~700 TPE post-regression, $3 million
Year 12 - ~400 TPE post-regression, $1 million if you end up under 400 but if you earned "too well" you might remain over 400 and have your adjusted salary be $2 million instead.  I'm assuming for the lowest salary scenario that you sneak under.
Year 13 - ~250 TPE post-regression, $1 million
Year 14 - ~160 TPE post-regression, $500 thousand.  However, depending on your specific earning, you might end up under 150 TPE and hit mandatory retirement.  I'm assuming you don't for the sake of needing one more season's worth of training & equipment
* Note: It is at least theoretically possible to break 800 TPE by the end of your player's fourth year, which allows a contract with no maximum length at a $4 million/year minimum.    If you signed one of those (and your team wants to), it would increase salary by $1 million in years 5 and 6 while decreasing it by the same in years 7-9, netting $1 million less in total career earning.  I'm not sure which approach is more common for teams or if typical high-earning 4th year players can reach the 800 TPE threshold to use this approach.
* Also note: the rules seem to imply that you could have a 15th ISFL season but in practice the current TPE earning rates precludes that, so I'll be using 15 total seasons as the maximum.

Fantasy
Theoretically optimal max earning requires fantasy participation for the extra 5 TPE/season.  That also gives you $1 million/year for participating and I'm going to count that for all 15 seasons even though the last season's TPE will be awarded too late for your player to actually use.

Shortfall
So in total, that's $42.5 million of salary and $15 million of fantasy participation vs. $322.5 million of total costs (15 seasons * $21.5 million/season), or a total shortfall of $265 million.

$265 million in media
So, how much media would you have to produce to earn all this money?  There are many ways for users in the league to generate content for others.  Starting with the media forum itself, we have podcasts, non-pressers, and pressers (payout rules for reference).  I'm also going to briefly look at the range of options for graphics and videos.  However, given that they incorporate a quality factor to the payouts (graphics payouts and video payout for reference), I'm going to look at what the pay would be assuming a constant grading result for every submitted item.  Of course in the course of an actual career with different submissions and graders you'd expect to instead have a range of different evaluations/pay, but the goal here is to look at best/worse cases.  I'm also going to ignore bonus media options (double media times, grader bonuses for graphics, etc.) since those are unpredictable or at least not guaranteed.
I focused on the options that involve a league user making something against a known payout table in advance and that doesn't require any luck, pre-approval, etc. since that allows someone to actually plan out their career approach in advance.  There are lots of other ways to earn money (league jobs, casino, etc) that I'm not going to cover here since they're not as simple to analyze.  They can be great options for people who are interested of course (and the league wouldn't work if we didn't have people doing the league jobs), but a conclusion of "just be a GM, a banker, and a streamer, and that covers your entire career" doesn't scale to every user in the league while media theoretically does.  If someone is doing those jobs or participating in the casino, it should be relatively easy to use the framework of analysis here to adjust the earnings shortfall by the league job salary and then re-run the numbers for the remaining shortfall.

Podcasts
These are paid at a flat rate per unit time but with a maximum length of 1 hour per podcast which would pay $4 million.  You'd therefore need to do 66.3 hours (or more specifically, 663 6-minute chunks with a maximum of 10 per podcast) of podcasts per career or an average of ~4.4 hours per season.

Non-pressers
The staggered per-word pay rate of written media (which looks like it done to encourage longer articles per this topic) results in a slight oddity in that it's most efficient to write multiple articles of 2501 words to maximize your pay per word.  To briefly recap the effective rate:
* 400 words: $1450/word
* 600 words: $1506 and 2/3/word
* 1000 words: $1644/word
* 1500 words: $1726/word
* 2000 words: $1757/word
* 2500 words: $1749.6/word
* 2501 words: ~$1909.4962/word
* 10000 words: $1714.9/word
* 100000 words: $1656.49/word
Articles under between 401 and 2499 words not exactly at the listed points are worth less per word than the following breakpoint - eg a 500 word article would be worth $1484/word.  As articles get infinitely long, their value per word approaches $1650.

So, turning those values into actual options.
1. One giant article that pays $265 million.  This would need to be 160,213 words long - ($265000000 - $4775650 (payout for a 2501 word article)) / $1650/word for words past 2501 = 157,712 more words after the first 2501, and 157,712+2501=160,213.  I'm ignoring that the forum doesn't actually allow single posts of this lengths for the purposes of analysis here.
2. Multiple 2501 word articles.  This would take 56 articles (or 55 and then one 1368 word article for the fewest number of words), working out to ~3.7 articles/season.
3. Lots of small articles.  Assuming all writing is done in short sub-400 word articles (and thus earns the minimum per-word payout), that would take 182,759 words, or 457 400 word articles, working out to ~30.5 articles/season.

Pressers
Pressers are paid using the same scale as non-pressers but with all payouts halved.  With the same 3 approaches, that turns into
1. One giant presser that pays $265 million.  This would need to be 320,819 words long - ($265000000 - $2387825 (payout for a 2501 word presser)) / $825/word for words past 2501 = 318,318 more words after the first 2501, and 318,318+2501=320,819.
2. Multiple 2501 word pressers.  This would take 111 pressers, working out to 7.4/season.
3. Lots of small pressers.  Assuming all writing is done in short sub-400 word postings, that would take 365,518 words, or 914 400 word posts, working out to ~61/season.

Graphics
Graphics payments are split into different categories.  Each category has its own payout scale based on the quality of the submission.  Some categories limit the number of graphics that you can submit for grading/payout per week and thus may not suffice as the sole earning option.
Signatures
* 1/7 @ $200k/each - you'd need 1325 total, or 88 and 1/3 per season.  Hopefully you'd get better at it eventually though.
* 7/7 @ $6 million/each - you'd need 45 or 3/season.
Football cards
* 1/7 @ $100k/each - these are limited to 10/week (or 1200/career) so getting only 1/7 would only earn you $120 million; you'd need to average a rating of at least ~2.21 to earn enough
* 7/7 @ $1.5 million/each - 177 cards or ~11.8/season.
Jersey sets (limit 1/week) cannot earn $265 million in one career (max $48 million)
Logos
* 1/3 at $450k/each - these are limited to 4/week (or 480/career) so getting only 1/3 would only earn you $216 million; you'd need 164 of them to be 2/3 to reach $265 million and would be making 480 or 32/season.
* 3/3 at $1 million/each - 265 logos or ~17.7/season.

Videos
The video grading scale is tricky since it grades lots of dimensions.  A perfect score 10 minute video earns $9 million, which results in ~29.4 per career (~2/season) to earn enough.  The minimum you could earn from a video while sufficing to earn $265 million over a career (15 seasons * 8 weeks/season * 2 max videos/week = 240 total videos) is ~$1.1 million/video.  An 8 rating on a 2 minute video earns exactly $1.1 million; for shorter options, an 11 rated video of 90 seconds earns $1.2 million and a 12 rated 60 second video earns $1.3 million.  A 13+ rated video of less than 60 seconds would also earn $1.5 million+, though I presume it's harder to get the higher ratings with very short videos like that (though to be fair, I haven't looked at ISFL video content other than the gameday broadcasts so my intuition might be off).

Twitter
Twitter normal engagement offers up to $800 thousand per week ($200k each for the first 3 tweets, $50k each for the next 4, limit 1/day) with some bonuses for getting the most retweets/likes.  Ignoring the bonuses, that would earn a maximum of $96 million ($800k/week * 8 weeks/season * 15 seasons/career) and thus not be sufficient to cover the entire shortfall.  If you managed to get the most likes and retweets every week, which give you $500k each and thus increase weekly earnings to $1.8 million, that would still only be $216 million.  As a result, Twitter payout is insufficient to entirely cover the shortfall for all TPE (though the $800k/week for posting does get you most of the way to the weekly training costs).

Other Media Considerations
There are at times various media bonuses over holidays, for certain topics, for new players, and so on.  As a general rule, I'm considering those to be too uinpredictable to rely on for the purposes of this article.  In practice, a lucky bonus or your being willing to produce tailored media to suit a prompt can greatly reduce the amount of media needed to earn enough league money.  Similarly, media graders can give bonuses due to diagrams or media that they consider particularly great, but it's difficult to turn that ability into concrete requirements for the purposes of the minimums that this article is covering.

League Jobs
As I said before, I'm not going to look directly at jobs as a way to earn enough for a career.  What I will mention is the range of pay, which is documented here.  Most positions are paid on a fixed amount for a league year, though there are some which are per piece of work done.  Those, since they are somewhat similar to the other media, are something I'll examine so it's alongside the other media.  I'm also going to not assign monetary value to the various passes since a dilligent earner can get those without spending league money.
* Awards graphics: $1 million per render
* Draft graphics: $1 million per ISFL render, $200k per DSFL render
* Dotts cards: $1 million for cards with new renders, $100k for existing renders
* Regression: $150k per player checked
All of these are at a fixed rate as compared to the other media with quality grading scales.  I'm assuming that for the graphics/cards it's due to those in the league position being pre-vetted to both know what the standard is and to have been judged as able to produce at that level consistently as part of the application/hiring process.  Still, $1 million is not much more than paid out for a 2/7 signature.  I'm assuming that's due to the need to make a large number of them in a hurry and the general reuse of existing images, but I'd honestly say the average draft graphic seems more like a 4-5 at a minimum.
Regression is more of a correct/incorrect kind of task, so it makes sense that there's no kind of scale there.

Timing Note
If you are trying to not just earn the maximum possible TPE but earn it as early as possible so that it has impact on your player for as long as possible, a couple of the strategies might not quite work out for your specific career.  If you're planning to submit signatures every week for your entire career, then I believe that the last grading would be paid out after you retire which is, of course, not useful to help pay for training and equipment in prior weeks.  Similarly, equipment purchase needs to be done before week 1 of the regular season to help out in all the games it can and so you need to have much more than half of the money available before the halfway point of a season.  Fantasy also seems to be paid out at the end of the season rather than the beginning (presumably at the same time the TPE claim post is made).
I personally find it's easier to be more excited about the league and making media for a new player anyway and thus build up my bank balance early, so it might work out naturally.  Still, that's one point to keep in mind if you're trying to come up with a guaranteed strategy for an entire career.

Conclusions
I'm definitely going to write a 160 thousand word article now (for reference, that's on the order of a novel)
The variety of options we have in the ISFL to earn league money let those participating hopefully find something they like and/or are good at.  Still, a fully max earning career takes a lot of league cash which takes a lot of time and/or skill at those options.  It's not all hopeless, though - I assume (but didn't check the data to verify) that most people stop spending full cash on their player's training/equipment at some point during regression.  As I examined in a post on the time value of TPE, the TPE a player earns later in a career is giving the player value/stats for a much shorter effective time.  Once you're planning on retiring is it really worth spending the couple million on training in your last season?  Admittedly it varies by person (if you have a billion in your account why not spend it?), team situation (if you're in the playoff hunt then those extra 5 TPE/week might be critical!), and plans for recreation (since if you're not recreating what does money do?).  Also, if you're not going all out during regression, it reduces the chances that you're able to play a final year since you're more likely to hit the automatic retirement point and that would save $20 million ($21.5 million minus the $500k salary you wouldn't make and the $1 million of fantasy you wouldn't earn; I'm not going to recalculate how much of each media type that would take but the per season values should be fairly similar).

[Frostbite]

Or just do casino

[Troen]

Or just do casino

While I'm not disagreeing exactly, the point of a casino is that you can be wrong and therefore not precisely predict the amount of effort needed to earn enough. A well-executed casino strategy can definitely be less work than doing pure media, but if you get unlucky/sim-screwed then you may find yourself in a position of needing to do a lot more work than you expected to make up the shortfall.

[Nathan]

With career length, IIRC a long time ago someone figured out it’s mathematically impossible to have a career last beyond 13 seasons as you’d need like 4000 something TPE to avoid hitting the 150 TPE retirement threshold

[Frostbite]

Or just do casino

While I'm not disagreeing exactly, the point of a casino is that you can be wrong and therefore not precisely predict the amount of effort needed to earn enough.  A well-executed casino strategy can definitely be less work than doing pure media, but if you get unlucky/sim-screwed then you may find yourself in a position of needing to do a lot more work than you expected to make up the shortfall.

Lol I was just joking I usually try not to genuinely recommend the casino to people for that exact reason. Really good article

[Troen]

Lol I was just joking I usually try not to genuinely recommend the casino to people for that exact reason. Really good article

Jokes?! In my our sim league?! Apparently it's more likely than you'd think.

But that aside, thanks!

[moonlight]

Reading this, I have literally no idea how I've managed to be a max earner for 2 HOF players. I'm struggling to pay for my 3rd player's career lol

[Rusfan]

Reading this, I have literally no idea how I've managed to be a max earner for 2 HOF players. I'm struggling to pay for my 3rd player's career lol

Just do what I do, make one big payday for each player and coast off of that for a few seasons

[JKortesi81]

Way to scare away all of the new guys already.

[nickyvmlp]

Is this a challenge?