At 05:54 PM 8/3/98 +1200, you wrote: >Wow. Tamra! I do not want to take up bandwidth by copying all those good >portal idea's again, but what sort of budget would you estimate to carry >all those things to their popular conclusion? >Can sponsoring and sales really make it pay, or should you also introduce >Bingo-on-line by subscription? Hey, Joop -- nice to see you back on the list. I'll deal with the "making it pay" question first. There are a few sites out there making money by selling banner ads -- but the latest I've heard suggests that direct sales combined with sponsorships (i.e. you ask a specific company to sponsor an entire section of a site, and they get their name all over it) may be a better way to go. Subscriptions...that all depends. The Wall Street Journal can charge, most other sites fail miserably. But I do know of a few newsletters (sent via email) that charge, and I know of some game sites that charge for certain areas. I don't think there's a good subscription model right now that anyone can follow with success, but I think there are a few possibilities out there that should be closely watched. With the number of portal sites out there, meep! will want to make it *easy* for folks to select their site as the portal, instead of one of the others, so subscriptions at the top level need to be avoided. Subscriptions to special areas? Maybe, in the future, if they get enough folks coming through. Look at the way some chat sites have free and "gold" plans, with the frequent users opting to move up to the "gold" plan to get a couple of extra features. How much to implement? Depends....(don't you just hate it when someone gives you that answer?) No really, there are so many variables in the things I suggested that it's a little hard to give estimates on things. If the question was from a client, right now I'd be asking for a more detailed specification before I could estimate. Oh, sure, I can give you really rough ideas -- somewhere between $5,000 and $250,000 comes to mind <wink> -- but what good are such rough ideas? Costs to implement selling all those goodies.... Well, the costs for the stuff for sale all depends on how many people come through (i.e. potential customers), whether or not you can find a manufacturer who's willing to give you an opportunity to print up small quantities of things for a reasonable price, and all the other issues that both virtual and non-virtual retailers go through on a regular basis. I tried my hand a retailing once upon a time, and found it the most difficult thing I'd ever tried. If it were me, I'd hire that whole section out to someone who is experienced (and GOOD) at retail sales or mail order, giving them a percentage of the gross, in trade for their having the ordering and fullfillment headaches. If you're really interested in this area, check out the E-Tailers Digest (our well-known Rainmaker's great little list) to see what sort of issues are involved in setting up credit card processing, how much to charge for shipping, how to deal with folks who won't pay, etc. etc. etc. Like I said, retailing is *hard* work. The CGI stuff and database stuff depends on how good/fast a programmer you are or have available. Writing a CGI to scan through all those press releases would be easy and fairly fast, but giving it the intelligence to grab good sentences loaded with Jargon and shuffle them back together into a single press release or article might take a bit more work. I know there are some bright folks at meep! or they couldn't have done the board, so I assume the talent is available. Balancing working on the BuzzwordBingo site with other (potentially better paying) work is the headache that all us web firms have to deal with at times. Is the cost of building something like this just the cost of the programmer's hours, or is it really that plus the cost of other lost (potential) business? That's an issue business owners have to think about, but that few do. Newsgroups or threaded discussion groups....Julian and company already have the meep! board running, so populating it is the key. I've been involved in a small community site that's starting up in Palo Alto California, and have had some interesting discussions about how to start communities. Getting your name out there (the PR aspect) isn't quite enough. I've been to sixDegrees and signed up -- haven't been back. Been to a couple of chat sites and signed up -- haven't been back. Why? The community drew me in, but failed to keep me. Long term, that's where the real expense will be in portals and in community sites -- not in the bright ideas or cool features, but in creating an *ongoing* relationship/community. As all of us old married folks can testify, building a relationship is hard work -- Bruce and I just celebrated our 8th year as a married couple, and it's hard to believe how much work we've had to put in to keeping going some times. The cost of hiring a programmer to build you a whiz-bang CGI to do a specific task is miniscule compared with the total costs of getting folks to your site, keeping them there, and getting them back again and again. Why is it so expensive? Because it takes time, and time is the most expensive thing out there. Communities and relationships are built from the ground up, not from the top down -- all you can do (as a webmaster or marketing joe) is pull folks in and give them the tools for building their own community. Part of the expense in doing something like BuzzwordBingo will be in trying new things (like the for sale stuff) and seeing if they work to build community, knowing that a percentage will fail, and being willing to give all these items the time to fail or succeed, based not only on some accountant's analysis of the daily numbers but also on buzz, goodwill, and participation. Well, I'm afraid I didn't give you any good numbers, just a lot of philosophy. Huh...no wonder Bruce does all the proposals around here! --Tamra Heathershaw-Hart WebDiva and Chief Idea Grrl ----------------------------------------------------- Hart Consulting Web Studio http://www.hartcons.com/ Web Site Design, Production, Programming, & Promotion 650-967-6162 (phone) 1-800-749-8032 (fax) ----------------------------------------------------- ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
