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On Wed, 12 Apr 1995, Jon Franklin wrote:

> > On Tue, 11 Apr 1995 meyer@newslink.org wrote:
> > 
> > > No publisher is ever going to willingly agree to sell his or her product on
> > > a per-article basis when there's an alternative. The profit motive just isn't
> > > there. One article can sell an entire issue on the newsstand, and one or two
> > > issues can sell a whole year's subscription. Unless you charge enough per 
> > > item to make up for this -- and that's a price the marketplace will never bear
> > > -- there's no incentive.
> > 
> This is a perfect example of the economic distortion of the journalism 
> business.  If the above is the case, and it often is, then in effect the 
> reader is paying quite a lot for that one article.  Only the reader 
> doesn't KNOW that.  We are accustomed, by virtue of tradition and 

If we start with a few given assumptions, like:
	A reader will spend 1-2 hours/day reading about 30 articles/day.
	The reader will spend $20-30/month for a subscription to the "Entire Web".
	There are about 3 million people willing to spend an average of $20/month.

This gives a revenue pool of about $60 Million/month.
This gives about 2700 Million hits/month.
This means a revenue pool of about 2 cents/hit.

Government databases such as edgar, usenet news, and other "free 
databases" could increase the pool to 4 cents/hit.

How many hits could you "Score" on your server?  If you average 25 
pages/minute, your server is netting $60/hour.  If you can stay up 24/7 
you can net over $1400/day that's $9800/week or $40,000/month.

If you charge advertizers for referals, say $1.00/hit, and can get 1 
hit/minute, that's another $40,000/month.

	Kismet

		Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Apr 19 19:18:00 1995
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