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:

----- begin -----
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
----- end -----

And here is my response to him:

----- begin -----
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)
----- end -----

response 2 of 34:

Mar 2 13:46 UTC 1997

Me neither.

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.

response 6 of 34:

Mar 2 18:50 UTC 1997

I too would rather we not go this route.

response 8 of 34:

Mar 2 20:43 UTC 1997

two thumbs down for technical reasons. even if the ads are served off their
computers, there's still the process of linking, and all the other stuff.
considering the speed at which grex's web-server already runs, I don't think
we need anything like that slowing us down.

response 10 of 34:

Mar 2 23:09 UTC 1997

I also think ads are a Bad Idea.

response 12 of 34:

Mar 3 00:02 UTC 1997

I would see such ads as rather annoying, and they would certainly cahnge hte
look and feel of the system quite a bit.  If they would allow Grex to be able
to afford vast hardware and net link upgrades, they might be worth it.  In
this case, though, it looks like it won't bring in all that much money, and
the disadvantages would far outweigh the advantages.

response 14 of 34:

Mar 3 02:12 UTC 1997

I'm against the idea in general.  I might be persuaded that it was good for
Grex, but nothing I've seen so far is persuasive.  

response 16 of 34:

Mar 3 05:55 UTC 1997

I don't like to turn down free money, but this is not free.  

I think the biggest problem with this plan is that it would make users feel
like grex is getting revenue from the ads and so donations are no longer
needed.  For that matter, even if ads could meet all of grex's needs, that
would be no substitute for our current user-based funding model.

That said, I fully support putting ads for CICnet in the MOTD and web pages
in exchange for services.  If we could strike a deal with Sun, Ameritech, or
any other such company for goods or services in exchange for ads, I would
favor that as well.  But grex should not start exchanging ads for cash.

response 18 of 34:

Mar 3 15:23 UTC 1997

Advertisingis already pervasive enough on the Web. There's no reason for Grex
to add to the cacophony. (In short, I concur with the majority opinion.)

response 20 of 34:

Mar 4 04:59 UTC 1997

Sounds like we've got a consensus here.  Cool.  It's been a while...

response 22 of 34:

Mar 4 09:39 UTC 1997

   a separate advertising page(s) might be worth looking into, but i'm with
the majority here when it comes to the idea of plunking ads on grex's page(s).

response 24 of 34:

Mar 4 19:34 UTC 1997

although feasible, allowing grex to become the vehicle for commercialism
in return for grex raking in a couple of bucks leaves me a chilly.
  
it's a nice offer, tha's for sure, but not for us, i think.

.:p