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Pastimes : The Death of Silicon Investor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d:oug who wrote (611)	4/19/2002 10:29:54 PM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1003

Golly, and i was even willing to subscribe to Raging Bull for a low yearly fee of about $20 - $50 just for a View Next 10 that still has advertizments ON. Of the people who tell me why they subscribe, Next 10 is one of the most popular reasons. They really do need to add it. Yes, it cuts into ad revenue, but ad revenue is so low, the subscription fee more than offsets it. Well, actually they probably have access to higher-quality, higher-paying campaigns than I do, and they sure do have a lot of ads. They're also using pop-ups and pop-unders, aren't they? I literally make roughly a penny per thousand ad-viewing hits. They might be making as much as a nickel or more per hit, since they've got so many ads and probably get the best campaigns. So it's possible they'd lose money in the long run by offering Next 10 or ad-free viewing. But maybe not. It's not just about how much you make per view. In their case, I would think that the number of views possible per hour would be a serious factor to consider. If fewer people are seeing ads (because they've paid not to or are seeing 1/10th as many because of Next10), enough bandwidth gets freed up that more people can see ads. It should balance out, IMO. That's been an important thing for me to prove out. I'm fanatical about speed, which means I can support a lot more users per machine and in a given amount of bandwidth than any other site can, so the cost of providing the service should be substantially lower per user, which means less reliance on ad revenue. I'd really hoped that the bursting of the bubble would rid these companies of what I see as mistaken notions about how advertising fits into these sites, but probably not. The ad climate is improving (I'm already seeing it -- more campaigns willing to pay CPM and higher rates, and better advertisers who're more likely to get clicked), so a lot of these companies will manage to survive and even thrive for a bit while still depending far too much on ads. Until the next time the ad market dries up.