I read a book called Syrup when I was stuck in Fiji with nothing to do. It's a fiction book about, among other things, marketing. In Syrup, there are several marketing "case studies". They're basically axioms or truisms. One such assertion is that everyone loves free stuff—even if it's worthless free stuff. The IconBuffet site run by FireWheel Design has gotten the free idea totally right. However, the stuff they are giving away is far from worthless.
When you sign up for the site, you are able to trade Icon Sets with other members of the site. Giving away the sets you have earns you points. More points means you can unlock more features of the site. Unlocked features allow you to trade Sets easier, and build up more points. Even though the points are the ultimate goal of the site, the two most important parts of trading icons are Stamps and Tokens. Stamps allow you to send out sets, and Tokens allow you to accept deliveries.
As a free member of the site, you get 10 Tokens every month to trade sets. When you accept deliveries, and use up tokens, you get 5 stamps to send out more deliveries. So far, there are 4 flavors of Sets—Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Diamond. Bronze sets take 1 Token to accept, and 1 Token to send, and Silver, Gold and Diamond take 3, 5, and 10 Tokens/Stamps respectively.
If you do a little math, it turns out that you have 50 or 125 Potential Points per Token (pp/t) for every Bronze set you accept, and 16.67 or 37.54 for Silver, 10 or 25 for Gold, and 5 or 12.5 for Diamond sets. How does this work? Well, like so: If you accept a Bronze delivery, you spend 1 Token and receive 5 Stamps. If you send out 5 Stamps worth of Bronze, Silver, or Gold deliveries, you get 50 Points. If you combine two Bronze deliveries for 10 Stamps, you can send out a Diamond set, and that gives you 250 Points. There's a formula at work here. (I apologize for the bad formatting, but it's the best I can do with XHTML.)
if (dr = ( Bronze | Silver | Gold )) : (s * 10) / t(dr)
pp/t = {
if (dr = Diamond) : (s * 25) / t(dr)
where s = stamps received = 5,
d = delivery received,
and t(dr) = tokens required to accept delivery
So it makes sense to only accept Bronze deliveries, because those get you the most Stamps which means more points. The other thing to take into consideration is the number of Tokens it takes to send a Delivery versus how many points you get when it's accepted. For all the Bronze, Silver, and Gold deliveries, every Token spent gets you 10 points. However, in the case of Diamond deliveries, you get 250 points for spending 10 Tokens—25 points per Token spent. So to maximize your possible points, accept only Bronze deliveries, and send out only Diamond sets.
Even though Stamps and Tokens are the most important part of the site, they are mysteriously visible only on your profile page. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, especially because that's not where you send deliveries from. It would be very helpful if you could see how many stamps and tokens you had on each page. I can think of two places where that would make the most sense—either next to the account link, like this:
Or next to the link to "My Icons". The latter makes more sense, and it would be easier to find as well. The only other real beef I have with IconBuffet is that they don't have any easy way to download your collected icon sets. For a site focused on trading icons that you'd use, it really should have an easy way to download your sets. But the site still works without it, so it's not a vital component, it would just make more sense.
It's also interesting to note that without the Chefs (those that create the icons) sending deliveries that are free to accept and still give you stamps, IconBuffet tends to go towards entropy. What I mean, is that the average number of Stamps gained by accepting a Delivery is 5, and the average number of Tokens required to send a Delivery is 4.5 ( (1 + 3 + 5 + 10)/4 = 18/4 = 4.5 ). If you're sending and receiving sets at the same rate, you'll end up with zero Tokens and Stamps at about the same time. Points wise, it's a bad idea to accept Gold or Diamond deliveries, but sending Diamond deliveries is very good.
Of course, all the math here doesn't take into account referring new members, which gets you Points, Stamps, and possibly Tokens as well. There really isn't much analysis required there—more is better.
IconBuffet has a very great community, and it's only going to get better as time goes on. It's fun, free, and very much harmless. I can see it becoming a huge success, I only wish that I had thought of the idea before they did. Oh well. If you want to try it out for yourself, I totally recommend it. If you don't mind the credit for referrals I get, click on this link, and I get 25 points or, this link doesn't give me the points. It would be nice if you used the referrer, though.