"I've never gotten a reasonable answer to the simplest of questions "If you're so good, why do you need my hundred bucks a month?"...
I used to ask this too, until I (too late now to whack me on the side of the head, 4 years after the fatal mistake) started a free web site about trading after my retirement from the brokerage business. I thought I would be the first person on my site to deposit knowledge, and that others would follow. At the time, it never occurred to me that the number of people who wanted knowledge compared to the people who had knowledge was totally lopsided, since I really didn't think that the market was even that interesting of a subject in the first place.
First, I was not a web master, so it cost $$$$ to get the thing up. As time went by, the amount of traffic demanded more hardware, bandwidth, etc., which escalated costs. Then, it got really out of control, due to all the fortifications necessary to survive things like DDOS attacks on the site, etc. It was costing loads of money to keep the site up!
Two years later, I realized that like it or not, I had to do something about the costs, and launched the first real time chat. That was nasty, since I don't actually sit there all day in real life, but paying customers demanded it. I gave that up, and tried to find other ways, such as teaching people to trade, and that was good, but it still demanded that I sit there all day, which was not good. Advertising was not an option, since ads are annoying to users, and paid very little.
That led me back to the original problem and the do or die situation, since thousands upon thousands of dollars had to be defrayed on a continual basis, which led to the question of why I was even going on, because in essence, I was working for free, so that others could use the site for free.
In the end, the only options were 1. to make it so that it was worth my while to keep the thing going, or 2. shut it down. I couldn't do #2, since that was defeating the purpose of why I made the site in the first place, so I had to go with option #1, which is make it so that all of the stuff that I wanted to give away was still there, but provide tangible products and services at a reasonable fee if people want the tools, techniques and insight that took me half a lifetime to develop.
This is still not the ultimate solution, because I still have to "work" on things other than my own trading, but until we find a better arrangement, the free stuff has to be defrayed at an economic level, somehow.
T. |
