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At 10:11 PM 6/21/2002, Mark wrote: >Hello Mr. Flint, > >I'm Herb Linkletter from the IIPA haha, nice turn around Mark. But let me turn it around again. The fact that I run LD and it really does cost me a lot of money and I really do have to face that every day is exactly where I'm coming from. It's just business, and it's the real world. Webcasting is a business too. Your costs are going up? Well boo-hoo, get out there and bring in some more revenues. If you can't figure it out, and there's a real opportunity there, somebody else will figure it out and take over. There are all sorts of costs associated with running a big internet site. Bandwidth, disk space, CPU cycles, networking services, equipment, labor, etc etc etc. It adds up quick. Every hit = $cost. A few years ago it was adding up to several hundred dollars per month for LD, totally out of my pocket. So I had to turn Looper's Delight into a business out of necessity, because it was unsustainable and getting bigger and bigger. I had to learn a lot about internet businesses in the process. I had to figure out things like advertising and donations and t-shirt sales and banner rotations and such. I had to take serious steps to contain costs, like moving out of expensive web host operations and into having my own server co-located in a data center, and then renting space out to other sites. I've steadily brought things in line to where I about break even on the monthly operating costs. I'm still way behind on covering the capital expenditures, so LD is a ways away from anything like "profitability". And I'm nowhere close to covering all the money I've sunk into this so far. All told, LD is still about $25,000 in the red, financed by me. Maybe I'll get that back someday, maybe not. As I see it, it's mainly up to me to deal with the reality of that. And I am dealing with it reasonably well, and I expect to have a self-sustaining operation out of it before too long. For me, every mail sent to the LD list and every visitor to the LD web site already does equal some real calculatable cost. That's reality, the internet really isn't free. My job is to figure out how to make every email and page-view pay some similar amount back to cover that cost. So if a new cost came along for the business of Looper's Delight, like your fictional email publishing royalty, and your fictional Mr. Linkletter told me this: >If this fee of .07 US per email (yes, even for "me too's") is too much of >a burden for you, I suggest you do a better marketing job and perhaps get >some real advertising to help you make up the revenue. We notice the LD >site uses a lot of bandwidth, so obviously some people feel the >information is useful and by useful, we mean worth money. well, he's exactly right. In the real world, either I figure out how to cover that cost or I go out of business or I sell it to somebody who knows how to run things better than me. LD survives or it goes bye-bye, and it depends on how well I'm able to operate it as a business. I have to figure out a business plan to make it work, and I have to figure out a way to finance that plan until the revenues from the business cover the cost. That's what business is. So yes, I absolutely agree. if the costs go up, I need to do a better job of bringing up the revenues as well. I can easily see that on LD I'm not doing all that great of a job with that, and with a better effort I could be doing a lot better. I can also take my experiences running medium sized internet sites and easily look at Live365 or other webcasters, and say exactly the same thing. They suck at making money off their web properties. They are probably a bunch of engineers or college kids or whatever, who are completely clueless about sales and marketing and business operations, fumbling around and trying to make it work out just like me. One big difference though: Broadcasting other people's music is obviously going to cost something, and they had to know that a long time ago because it's in the law. Just the details weren't clear. If they didn't plan for it, they're idiots. So now they know how much it costs. Great, stop crying, go plug the numbers into the business plan, figure out what you need to do to stay afloat, and go make it work. Most likely they already have that figured out. Now if this were happening to LD, would I fight those added costs? Of course! Would I cynically manipulate all of you to fight on my side, even though it is not in your benefit? Better believe it! I would be telling you that all web communities like LD will be destroyed and the internet we know and love will be ruined forever, even if I knew it wasn't true? Yep! Would you fall for my BS? Apparently so. At the same time I would be doing all the planning and accounting in the background to figure out what needed to be done to make it work. Without even doing much homework, I can see options available to me that would allow LD to survive if a similar royalty were applied here. Would I tell you about any of that while I'm engaged in the fight? no. So when all of these webcasters are crying and moaning that these new royalty rates are exorbitant and oppressive, I think they are full of crap. I just don't believe that story at all. They're not going out of business from it unless they just roll over and die without even trying. They just have to go figure out how to sell real advertising instead of "the museum of musical instruments" or whatever other pathetic ads I listen to all day on these stations. If they can't figure that out, then they will be going out of business anyway. kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com