Re: OT: CARP passed- this sucks.

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

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