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On Tue, 11 Apr 1995 meyer@newslink.org wrote:

> >Actually, for those who have authentication capabilities, it's heaven.  
> >You can give your customers all the references you want, and they (or 
> >you) can pay me at the end of the month :-).

> Rex: That's fine if you adopt the pay-for-news strategy, but what if
> you're using that ads-pay-for-news strategy? Sam's Grocery, which had
> been paying you $1,000 to put an ad on your page suddenly is offered
> a chance to pay only $500 for an ad that will appear on someone else's
> page that links to your page and other pages, as well. Where do you
> think Sam is going to put his money?

Actually, there are already a few electronic "Ad Agencies" that put up
"Home pages" for varous small businesses.  Rather than try to buy the 
"space" and have the references appended to the content by the publisher, 
the "Agent/Vendor" can put up a nice friendly "front end" which will give 
search results from various sources, including some of his paid for 
"Advertizing".  The advertizer pays for the content out of his 
"Commisions" from products brokered through the Web.  Wais.com and 
infohouse.com are good examples of this type of approach.

Where will Sam pay for the ad?  Each time someone "orders a pizza".
I could browse through sam's grocery store via the web and be able to 
pick up all my groceries - prepaid, at a "drive-through window".  You 
wouldn't even have to get out of your car.  You could also drop off the 
laundry.

It is a different paradyme.  The trick is, anyone who wants to can put up 
a "printing press", but no one will read the ads unless they can get 
people to their home page reference.  The movie theater started when 
candy stores started showing movies to sell the candy.  The vendor/broker 
will pay for gobs of content so that customers will use their home-page 
as the primary source.

Stockbrokers have been doing this for a few years now.  They will go to 
ADT and give quote and news information to their frequent traders.  Even 
"discount brokers" can pick up a few hundred in margins and commisions, 
just by putting up a delayed-feed ticker and a news feed.

As an information provider or distributor, you should ask, "what would 
someone who reads my content want to buy?".  Are there "brokers" of that 
product (retailers are brokers of a sort), and who are they?  Do these 
brokers have web servers?  Would they put a few pages on your web server 
if you could fax them cash orders and collect a "royalty or commission"?
How much commission would they pay?  How much would they pay for each 
"warm lead"?  What percentage would they pay for the priveledge of using 
your content to attract cusotmers?

Did you know that Movie theaters till make 90% of their profit on the 
Candy?  The Guarentees, Royalties, and Advances on the film come to about 
90% of the ticket price.  The $3.00 bucket of popcorn yields a $2.80 
profit.  That is the value of your content to the Web Vendor.

	Rex Ballard

From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Apr 12 18:23:11 1995
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