Subject: Profit potential?? From: "Curt A. Monash" <0006058685@mcimail.com> Date: Thu, 6 Jul 95 15:39 EST

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Dominque writes, in part:

"You know, we keep saying this -- that few have made money online. But when
I look at the figures, in fact an astounding amount of revenue has been
generated online in both subscriptions, ads and transactions for the
commercial services, and if you factor in the image/marketing aspects of net
sites, and the publicity generated, there is clearly current value there,
too."

What figures???????? And how much money does it take to astound you?

He also writes:

"The problem is the cost of building, providing, promoting  and upgrading
far outstrips the revenue gained for commercial enterprises (an
oversimplification but generally true to this point). And  short-term
corporate think -- which many would argue put all kinds of manufacturing and
product industries way behind over the last few decades -- seems a
particularly unsuitable and  unrealistic expectation for this environment,
yet the short-term pressure is there within many companies whose esteemed
representatives people this list."

It sounds like you're saying that revenues have been very high, but expenses
have been a lot higher.  Sounds plausible, up to a point, but again: What do
you regard as a lot of money?

Personally, I hold with the late Senator Dirksen:  "A billion here, a
billion there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money."  When
assessing start-up businesses and industries, I might even be willing to
knock off an order of magnitude, but no more -- until revenue streams are
measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, we're not talking about
anything that's significant to the economy overall.

Of course, when discussing my personal wealth, I'll go down another zero or
two -- but if I can't build a company whose revenue and value are both in
the millions of dollars, preferably tens of millions, why bother?  I was
making a good living as a sell-side stock analyst ... 

Curt Monash
cmonash@mcimail.com



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