<< What Wall Street seems to understand very well is that the TV time owned by NM is not free as you keep writing>>
If they already own the time and use 27 minutes to use selling the infomercial item and 3 minutes to sell E4L.com instead of using 30 minutes to sell the item, where is the cost you are saying the Street seems to recognize?
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<<It is time that could be sold to others for a profit>>
Not true, what does this mean? See above. The time is owned by ETV. The "profit" you speak of is whose? ETV? They own the infomercial and the name E4L. The TV station's? Is ETV's money not as good as another company's? Please clarify.
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<Free trial memberships are not the same as paying memberships. >
I don't disagree. The people who do not take the memberships for free pay more for the merchandise. ETV gets that money. The people who do join are induced to stay members by being offered more freebies.
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<<Bartering what is not really free to get something else to use as inducements to get people to pay for memberships is a lot of smoke and mirrors. >>
It's called leverage and margin. If they give away a $75 dollar phone card that plasters a company's name all over it and they provide the customers, whom does it cost? It does not cost the ETV anything marginally. It's an advertising expense to the phone card company. Please listen to the vcall.com meeting.
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<<People expect services on the Net to be FREE. If you get millions of people visiting your site you should be able to make a profit on them besides charging them an entrance fee.>>
Netmarket, run by Cendant, has many members. People will and do join it. Netmarket is important to Cendant and has many members (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/990210/ny_cendant_2.html). By joining through E4L.com, they get more benefits than it costs for membership, even more than through netmarket. Right now, netmarket is number 11 on the top 100 list of malls (http://www.toptenlinks.com/shopping/malls.vote) and Broadcast.com which receives millions of hits a day, has links direct to E4L via its shopping links. Why would Broadcast.com execs invest in this company if they were out of touch with the vision of the internet to be?
People expect store shopping to be free, too, but people also buy memberships to CostCo and Sam's club. Why should they want to pay to drive somewhere and stand in line any more than to shop at the convenience of their computer? They will go for price - one stop best price shopping - if it is cheaper to pay a fee and shop for less all year than no fee and higher prices.
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<<If you get millions of people visiting your site you should be able to make a profit on them besides charging them an entrance fee.>> CD runs the site, ETV provides the customers by trying to sell memberships to all 6 MILLION calls/sales customers they talk to each year. Please see the recent Press Release.
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I urge people to listen to the vcall.com meeting for (the former) National Media. |
