NarrowCast Media has offered to sponsor our website

Mar 2 13:11 UTC 1997

As webmaster, I received a message from Eric J. DePrano of NarrowCast 
Media. They have made us an offer, namely that we permit them to place 
advertising on our website, and they will pay us for every hit.

I am interested in hearing what the Grex membership and user base thinks 
of this idea. Try to be open minded, and we can list out the pros and 
cons and bring up this question at the next board meeting, which I 
believe is scheduled for March 26

Here is the letter I received:

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From: eric@narrowcastmedia.com (Eric J. DePrano)
To: webmaster@cyberspace.org
Subject: Site Sponsors
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 20:12:57 -0800

Hi,
I visited Welcome to Grex! at http://www.cyberspace.org/ and liked it a 
lot. The company I work for, NarrowCast Media, would like to sponsor 
your website.

NarrowCast Media would like to place banners at the top and bottom of 
each webpage in your website. These banners will be dynamically served 
from our fast Internet servers.

NarrowCast Media has gathered together over 1000 host websites into a 
network. It is our job to get sponsors for these websites. By joining 
the network you will be able to generate revenue in the same manner as 
sites such as "Yahoo" and "Hot Wired". The difference is that we do all 
you work to bring in the sponsors. We will even give you the HTML code 
that is quick and easy to cut and paste into your Webpages.

The Bottom Line: We will pay you up to $8.00 per thousand unique host 
impressions. This means that for every 1000 people that see a banner on 
your website we will pay you up to $8.00.

This program offers websites an extremely effective method for 
increasing your revenue. You can join even if your website only gets 1 
hit each month.

Please visit our website at <http://www.narrowcastmedia.com> for more 
information and the host site application. Joining the network is quick, 
easy, and free.

Take Care,
Eric DePrano
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And here is my response to him:

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Eric,

Thank you for your interest in Grex and in our web site.. This method of 
generating revenue for our system is one that we must consider for a 
while. I hope you will leave the offer open for a month or more, while 
we discuss this.

Grex is an openly democratic organization, run by its members. Anyone 
can be a member by merely supporting us. Non-paying users are also 
allowed to share their thoughts about how the system should be run. The 
disadvantage of this kind of organization is that it takes a long time 
to make decisions.

I will begin the discussion of your offer on-line shortly in the coop 
conference, which is accessible via telnet/picospan or http/backtalk, as 
explained on our web site. Feel free to join the discussion once it gets 
started, if you care to.

Action will probably be taken at the next scheduled board meeting on 
March 26. You should hear from us shortly after that date with our 
decision.

-srw (Steve Weiss, a Grex webmaster, webmaster@cyberspace.org)
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