Online Information Development and Design
            Where Paradigms Aren't Worth Two Bits
                        This Space For Rent
___________________________________________

Steve Outing, pounding the keyboard in frustration, wrote:

> On 5/24/96, Donovan White wrote:
> >Steve Outing wrote:
> >> I've gotten a couple sponsors to this list, ...
> >
> >What ads where? ...
> >
> >I must have missed something somewhere. I've never seen any mention 
> >of a sponsoring affiliation, never seen an advertisement, except for 
> >Rosalind's last post. So what does a sponsor get for her buck? 
> >
> You haven't visited the online-news archive site on the Web. Netscape's banner 
> is there, plus smaller ads for Interactive Publishing Alert and The Postmaster. 
> ( http://www.social.com/social/hypermail/news/index.html ) The site gets a few hundred visits a week.

But a Web ad can hardly be considered an adequate substitute when the 
primary buy is exposure on a mail list.
 
> If you subscribe to the digest version of the list, you'll see a 2-line text 
> blurb for Netscape each time you receive a digest. Sponsor messages (text) 
> also are included with each automated Welcome New Member message, and on the 
> monthly "housekeeping" note I send out to the list.

Now we're talking a one- or two-a-day exposure, a one-time-ever
exposure, and a once-a-month exposure. Again, the product you're
pitching to advertisers is a mail list, with daily item counts
between 50 and 100. 

> >I've suggested a few times that Steve should prepend advertisements
> >to every post that comes off the list. I like the idea so much I've
> >decided to implement it myself on my own posts. For now, it's just
> >me hanging up there, but I'd be glad to sell the space for, I don't
> >know, fifty bucks a month. 
> >
> Donovan's sarcastic response is exactly why I haven't done that. I tend to 
> think it'd just annoy everyone to see a sponsor blurb on 20 messages a day -- 
> and they'd quickly be tuned out anyway.

Damn. I should have used a serious-faced smiley. I wasn't being
sarcastic, just humorously serious. As opposed to seriously humorous,
which is beyond my scope. I strongly believe that advertising should
be a component of any online publishing effort where technically
possible. That's the other half of my message. I'm perfectly willing
to run someone else's ad in place of my own, and the rate, for a
while, is fifty bucks a month. 

And you can't have it both ways. Either everyone will tune it out
anyway or they will be annoyed. My guess is the former unless, as 
with any other medium, the ad content is compelling and fresh.
 
> I'm probably overly sensitive on this topic, but notes like Donovan's frustrate 
> me. This attitude -- I suppose mostly from Internet old-timers -- that 
> everything should be free, and for a list, advertising taints the pristine 
> nature of our free-flowing discussion, is distressing. 

I never said I thought everything should be free, I just said I'm
cheap. Half of my message is that publishers need to devise
publishing models with multiple revenue streams. I also have never
said that advertising taints the pristine nature of our free-flowing
discussion. I've merely suggested that it should be better executed
than Rosalind does it. And I have always pitched the idea of 
prepending ads to every item in the traffic stream.

> Fact is, when I tally up 
> the costs of continuing to run this and my other list and associated Web site, 
> it's hundreds of dollars a month. Until I found my first sponsor, 
> Cyberspace Development Inc. (which hosts the lists on its servers) and I ate 
> those costs for many months. Neither of us expects to make much money from the 
> lists, but they need to pay for themselves and compensate the time I and other 
> people spend in maintaining the lists. 
> 
> Many lists are a labor of love for the administrators. I do it partly out of 
> altruistic reasons, but, obviously, it's also beneficial to my consulting 
> practice.

You're the envy of us all, actually. 

> Cyberspace Development also receives psychic rewards for its role, 
> and not much more. (http://marketplace.com, if you're curious.)
> 
> If online-news is valuable to you, I suggest you need to pay for it -- by 
> being exposed to a sponsor's message, or contributing directly to its upkeep. 
> I am tempted to do a *voluntary* subscription, say $25 a year. If 80 of you 
> took me up on this, then I'd have the $2,000 I need to switch to a better list 
> management software package. I don't have the money in the list budget to do 
> this with the sponsors I have now. (I had been thinking about using SmartList, 
> another free mail list manager package, but found it to be frustrating to 
> use for a non-chip-head like me. That idea's been scratched.)

Tell you what. I'll pay the $25, you prepend my ad on online-news and 
online-newspaper traffic one day a month. 

dw

 

        Donovan White

        Online Information Development and Design
        dwhite@olinfo.com          (508) 597-5321           

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End of online-news-digest V1 #662
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From owner-online-news-digest@marketplace.com Sat May 25 22:54:05 1996
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