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Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ThirdEye who wrote (10412)	8/4/1999 8:35:00 PM
From: Rande Is	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 57584

I shouldn't speculate on what appears to be a decision to favor this being a free site. . .and sell advertising. . over being a gated community. But I don't think either the "too many subpeona" or "too many paid promoters" theories hold up. If I were venture a guess at the reasons that would cause such a dramatic change, I'd guess. . .advertising revs are based on page hits and "hang time". . .and SI has had a very "sticky" reputation. . .in other words, we tend to "stick around" longer on each page we visit. . .now imagine if there were some ads [no matter how small] on those pages. . .it could yield some pretty hefty revs, compared to "lifetime memberships" where the revs have long since been spent. Another reason might be that Raging Bull has recently partnered with AltaVista. . . Motley Fool is partnered with AOL. . Yahoo is partnered with itself. . .and Silicon Investor and the rest of the Go 2 Net sites are partnered with. . .well. . .nobody? So I would guess that they might be looking to form a partnership with say, InfoSeek or maybe Lycos. Such partnerships can quickly double, triple or more the membership. . .and bring millions of faces to those ads. . .generating mucho dinero for many years to come, thus instantly increasing the value of the site. So the beginning of the end was when SI ceased being privately held, in my opinion. It will surely grow large and fast from here on out. Rande Is