response 4 of 34:

Mar 2 16:28 UTC 1997

I have no fundamental problem with selling ad space.  For me, it
boils down to how much moola it would bring in, how annoying and
intrusive the ads are, and how we can exercise content-control in
the case of particularly controversial advertisements (such as for
tobacco, alcohol, pro/anti-abortion messages, and so on).

As for money, looking at our web server stats
(http://www.cyberspace.org/stats/), it would appear that we're
getting around 5,000 distinct hosts hitting us per week.  Depending
on how they count distinct hosts (e.g., distinct over what time
period?), that could yield 20,000 distinct host hits per month, or
$160 per month in revenue, or $1920 per year, the equivalent of 32
annual Grex memberships - pretty substantial revenue for Grex.

However, that estimate is on the optimistic side.  A lot of those
hits are for user pages, to which it would be rather intrusive, and
a bit technically challenging, to automatically add advertisements.
Abbagirl's award-winning site, for example, got 25% our of Grex's
web hits last week.  (Jeez, she could earn $40/month with her web
pages alone! :-)

Also, people can always turn off graphics-autoloading, so Backtalk
users wouldn't need to see the ads each time they read a response.
But if they don't load the image, I doubt Narrowcast's hit-counter
would to register the hit, so that would again lower the revenue
estimate above.

So on the whole, I don't think this would bring in enough revenue
to be worthwhile, unless we were to impose ads on user web pages,
which I don't think would go over well.