The discussion over how to fund newspapers continues, with Michael Kinsley weighing in today on the op-ed pages of The New York Times. Based on the failure at Slate (ancient by Internet time standards), Kinsley argues you can’t charge “by the slice” for content. I usually enjoy Kinsley’s observations for their wit and insight, but this time he missed the mark, showing little cognizance of tech and market advances since his Slate experience). Ironically, his piece came on the same day as coverage of Amazon’s new Kindle 2.0 device, which happens to charge by the slice. Michael, perhaps you could sit down with Jeff Bezos and compare business plans.
Kinsley’s piece apparently is in reaction to Walter Isaacson’s TIME endorsement of “micro-payments” for news content. (By the way, how can The New York Times or Kinsley for that matter justify not linking to a piece explicitly referred to in Kinsley’s article? I mean, just what is going on here? Arrogance? It has to be intentional, coming at a time when The Times is getting lots of attention for Web innovation.) Many other new contributions to the debate we raised here a month ago ago (really a renewal of the longstanding debate over micro-payments) are surfacing: Glenn Fleishman at Publicola has an insightful analysis of advertising realities on the Web, and Clark Humphrey comments on Glenn’s piece (neither are about micro-payments per se). Meanwhile, the most (in my opinion) thoughtful and comprehensive look comes from Steven Brill:
“All online articles will cost 10 cents each to read in full, with simple, one-step purchases powered by an iTunes-like Journalism infrastructure. (Apple, which turned my children from music pirates to music micro-buyers, could become a joint-venture participant, but that is hardly the only way to create a convenient payment engine.)”
I don’t think Brill’s multi-tiered system (he also supports a “one-day pass” for 40 cents, a month-long pass for $7.50 and annual fee of $55) is the right answer. I still back a penny a click, given the dynamics of Web commerce and critical mass. Once you start slicing and dicing, you confuse consumers. And people don’t want to pay even a day in advance for something they aren’t sure they’ll want to buy (compare RealNetworks’ music success with Apple’s). If Apple had charged $4 for a Beatles song, $1.50 for a Starlight Mints number and 3 cents for an Eagles tune, iTunes would have kept Napster in business for years. (Brill even calls for 5 cents to forward an article. That’s just bone-headed; forwarding should be free. Let recipients decide whether they want to read the article and pay for it themselves.)
A couple of thoughts:
First, can we officially retire the term “micro-payments”? It’s been stigmatized beyond redemption. And there are so many different types that the term has lost all meaning. We can refer to pay-as-you-go systems by their specific form; e.g., subscription-based, or pay-per-view, or whatever. I prefer “penny a click.” KISS.
Second, no one seems to bring up content providers’ biggest asset: Archives. Recall that The New York Times used to charge for archived articles. It gave up because charging was such a huge disincentive versus “free.” But its mistake was charging too much: $1.50 per piece if memory serves. Not to overstate it, but a penny would prove no barrier to archival retrieval and over time represent a healthy revenue source, for any content provider, not just The Times.
However many permutations the discussion involves, at least it’s happening. And that’s good. We need to get people to think of content as something to be paid for. The exact iteration will work itself out. I vividly remember early discussions over video on the Web. Why wasn’t it happening? What would it take for someone to provide easy ways of posting all those home/hobbyist videos they were taking? The arguments back then — that it was too time-consuming, storage was too expensive, broadband was not fast enough — all disappeared virtually overnight with YouTube, because storage became cheap and broadband got faster (and more ubiquitous). All we need are a couple of technological advances to make a penny a click easy and transparent, and we’re off and rolling toward a transaction economy for the Web.
10 cents an article is like 100 bucks to rent a DVD. Does he know how many articles are in the New York Times every day? If a typical educated reader (not you, wingnuts!) peruses 50 articles a day it would cost 5 bucks to scan the daily paper. FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS A DAY!!! Not fucking likely in the jaws of Great Depression II. Let’s get real here — 1/10th of a cent is more like it.
Pay a penny a click?
All that is going to do is help the liberal media cover up the crimes of democrats.
How many even on this blog would pay a penny to read about-
The FBI raided the offices of a defense lobbying firm with close ties to Democratic Rep. John Murtha (Penn.), sources tell ABC News.
The FBI searched the Virginia headquarters of the PMA Group in November, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. PMA was founded by former Murtha aide Paul Magliochetti and specializes in winning earmarked taxpayer funds for its clients.
Good government groups have long criticized Murtha’s cozy relationship with a handful of lobbyists and defense firms, ties that see millions of dollars in government spending go out from Murtha’s office, and hundreds of thousands in campaign donations come in.
…
The companies reportedly have received over $100 million in earmarks, thanks to Murtha’s efforts.
Of course this is a dog bites man story, but still.
‘The Gamesters of Triskelion’
Captain ‘s log, Stardate 3211.7.
We are entering standard orbit
about Gamma ll,
an uninhabited planetoid
with an automatic communications
and astrogation station.
Ensign Chekov,
Lieutenant Uhura, and I
will beam down
and make a routine check of its facilities.
………………
What do you think you’re going to do with us?
I am Galt, the Master Thrall.
This place is the planet Triskelion.
You are to be trained
and spend the rest of your lives here.
…………..
Escape is quite impossible —
as demonstrated by your collars of obedience.
Return to your quarters
…………….
Provider 1 bids 300 quatloos for the new comers.
Provider 2, 350 quatloos.
Provider 3, 400.
1,000 quatloos.
1,050 quatloos.
2,000.
2,000 quatloos are bid.
Is there a challenge?
The newcomers have been vended to Provider 1.
We’re free people.
We belong to no one.
Such spirit.
I wager 15 quatloos that he is untrainable.
20 quatloos that allthree are untrainable.
5,000 quatloos that the newcomers
will have to be destroyed.
Accepted. Mark them, Galt.
……
re 2: Would that you would have demonstrated such concern when the vice-president was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from his old employer, Halliburton.
You can’t make a valid point about this sort of political patronage when the story of your party goes straight from the bottom to the top.
You guys are on the ‘grease my palm’ level of a bordertown Mexican cop.
But once again you are off topic. The subject is making the Internet profitable for content providers. How you got from thewre to Jack Murtha’s earmarks is a mystery.
Would huffington charge a penny a click?
How many would want to pay a penny to read about some liberal being disappointed in obama? (this is from john santore, Obama campaign organizer, frmr congressional speechwriter)
Recently, I’ve been forced to deal with my own rank hypocrisy concerning the Obama administration. I find myself flying off the handle in all directions, attacking the new team in Washington one minute and defending it the next, praising its critics and then assaulting them for being unreasonable and expecting too much, too soon. The end result is that I’m far more confused about the future of Barack Obama’s presidency than I was with Bush’s.
…
I ended up agreeing with Rich’s point and then immediately attacking him. “I don’t know why everyone is acting surprised,” I said. “We all knew who Obama was before he took office.” I was, in essence, mad at Rich for writing an article I agreed with because it criticized an aspect of the President I thought everybody should be familiar with, even though Obama did whatever he could to present an opposing image during the campaign. It’s always an interesting feeling to recognize the degree to which your current sentence is contradicting your last one even before you finish saying it. It’s rather unnerving, to say the least.
Was john’s post worth a penny? To people that knew obama was lying during the campaign he’s only writing what they were saying during the campaign. To those that voted for him, well, they don’t believe john anyway.
Poor john goes home with a penny in his pocket.
The same is said of you…
Where’s the outrage for murtha?
And what about the outrage when clinton was using “no bid contracts” with haliburton?
At least I used the words penny and click in my post. Your post at #3 was just gibberish.
Quite the hypocrite aren’t you. You voted democrat didn’t you.
Does anybody on the planet give a flying monkey’s ass what Marvin thinks about anything? No? I didn’t think so.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/114.....Fight.aspx
Hmm, it looks like America still believes that Republicans suck.
What’s your point? Plenty of FreeRepublicers would click on it.
I think the pay-per-article format is dead, and isn’t going to be revived anytime soon. A lot of dinosaur newspapers tried it before 2005, basically because old-line publishers bristled over the idea that somebody might actually read an article if they didn’t have a subscription. Those newspapers required you to buy a regular subscription which gave you access to an abbreviated on-line version through a log-in, or in the alternative, allowed you to search for an article in their archives and then wanted you to pay several dollars to read the article. Surprise – very few paid, especially since they could get the content free from other sources.
The disconnect between the writer/publishers and the public is over the perceived value of the article. The writer/publisher looks at the work/investment they put into the article and wants to make sure they are compensated accordingly. The public, however, is unwilling to assign much value to an article that they haven’t read yet, and even then will usually assign a much lower value to the article than the writer/publisher does. To the reader, there are tens of thousands of articles competing for his/her time, so how much value is one article going to be?
If anything, the reader has been trained to expect to receive the content for free over the past few years. There will be a lot of resistence to paying for content over the internet now. Some industries can make that transition – public water to bottled water, broadcast television to Cable TV – but there has to be a pretty big increase in value to justify it.
I still think the future lies in paid advertising on internet sites, even if it doesn’t pay for itself currently. This doesn’t mean that every blog will be able to sustain itself – there are a lot more bloggers with high opinions of the readability of their articles than there are prospective readers of their blogs. (See Time to Hang Up the Pajamas: Why You Won’t Get Rich Bloggin
Right now the “conventional wisdom” is that advertisors won’t pay for interent advertising, at least not to the same extent they will for print publishing, because they don’t think they get the same value and readership isn’t uniformly measurable. It’s true that advertisors don’t pay as much, but the reasons given are a lot of bunk.
Advertisors can place ads in print publications and will only know how many paid subscriptions the publication has, plus newstand sales. What they don’t have any idea of is the efficacy of those ads – how many people bother to read the magazine at all (many magazines in my house go from mailbox to coffee table to recycling without being opened). Even if the magazine is opened, they have little idea how many people actually see the page their ad is printed upon, or spend any time on it.
In contrast, websites can measure with a fair degree of accuracy how many people visit their sites, which pages are viewed, whether specific ads are displayed on the screen (“impressions”), and most importantly – how many click onto the ad to find out more information.
But most companies with huge ad budgets have their advertising controlled by advertising agencies, which get most of their money based upon the size of the ad budget (in the form of direct commissions, kickbacks from media, etc.). They are the ones being most resistent to internet advertising, and the ones who are perpetuating those myths.
Why should they do so? Well, internet advertising hits them in the pocket in several ways. First and foremost, it attacks “image advertising” – the idea that an ad which promots the company or product image, without directly selling any product, is cost effective. Advertising agencies LOVE image advertising, because it expends large amounts of money, has no real accountability for efficacy, and wins them acclaim in their field (awards, etc.). Interent advertising, because it is more measurable, tends to show that advertising in general, and image advertising in particular, is far less effective than advertising agencies have purported for decades.
Secondly, few internet sites are going to give kick-backs to the advetising agencies to place their ads with them. This is not only a major source of revenue for the advertising agencies, but the freebies are a valued perk by them (tickets to sporting events, expensive dinners, trips, etc.).
But as advertisers transition to the new media model of internet advertising, then I think we will see more money going in that direction.
If the would report all the news they wouldn’t be in this mess you can’t expect liberals to support newspapers.
Like Billions in money market funds was withdrawn within two hours on Sept.18th. 2008 Anyone knows a link to this or better yet whom lead this withdraw like maybe George Soros.
Except you.
You replied to me.
Let’s see how long you can go without replying to me or using my name in your posts.
I predict not very long.
Would the penny a click also apply to liberal blogs, like HA or maybe this one…
http://perceptionmanagers.org/.....n-rnc.html
Only someone left of center could get away with this without being called a racist.
re 6: I’m not ‘outraged’. Infantile fury is an impotent weapon. I’m the progressive fringe element that will guide this party and this nation toward the right path if it takes 30 years. Hell, I’d be a Republican if I thought they were capable of engaging with reality.
There are a few things wrong with your comparison of Murtha and Cheney:
1) Cheney is a draft dodger. Murtha is a battle tested veteran.
2) Cheney (as a highly placed government official) worked to start a war under false pretenses and profited from it (Halliburton made billions. Do you know how small that is in reference to millions).
3) You are an asshole.
Think of people like me as the little Japanese ox herder with the tiny whip. It’s very zen.
Penny a flick, Marvin. Are you feeling saucy?
There’s a sort of compromise scheme, which has been tried by Salon and some other online publications. You can pay a nominal subscription fee to gain unfettered access to everything. Otherwise, you can peruse the headlines and the lead paragraph of each article, then if you want to read an article in its entirety, you have to watch a big-ticket, full-screen Flash advertisement.
I’ve always seen the periodical publishing business as working something like a garage sale. You put price tags on your junk not because you expect to make a lot of money selling it, but rather because it helps convince shoppers that the crap is worth enough that they actually want to haul it away for you. Having enough cash for beer and pizza at the end of the day is a bonus.
Similarly, the piddly-ass cover price of a magazine or newspaper, or a day’s worth of the subscription fee, doesn’t anywhere near pay for the cost of printing and delivery. It does make you feel like you’re getting something worth reading (after all, you paid for it) and it gets the ads on the inside pages in front of pairs of eyes.
It remains to be seen how long it’ll be before Sun Myung Moon and Rupert Murdoch get tired of shelling out millions of dollars (yes, News Corp. is losing money nowadays) to keep preaching to the right-wing faithful. It’s pretty apparent they’re not making many new converts.
Now this is an article I would gladly pay a penny for.
A reporter from the “Black Press of America” letting on to what goes on at those obama press conferences. “Window dressing,” that’s when liberals parade blacks around.
After the first black president completed his first prime-time press conference, the black press was red hot.
“We were window dressing,” said Hazel Edney, a reporter with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, also known as the Black Press of America. “We were nothing more than window dressing.”
As the media filed into the stately White House East Room on Monday night, the reporter was shocked to find herself in the front row. Alongside her were the top news agencies, Associated Press, Reuters; also up front, 86-year-old Helen Thomas, who started covering presidents 50 years ago.
Alongside the most prominent journalists in America was Tiffany Cross from Black Entertainment Television. Like Miss Edney, she didn’t know why she was in first-class while all the television networks – every single one – was exiled to the steerage compartment.
“I really don’t know why I’m up here,” Miss Cross said with a shy smile.
While most on the front row got to pose a question to President Obama, the two reporters from the black press did not. Nor did any other black-press reporter, for that matter.
I wonder why-
I wonder if bloomberg news was sent to the second row for outing the democrats version of healthcare.
The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.
Elderly Hardest Hit
Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.
Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.
6/14 Kinda fascinating how Cheney sucked up to the Clinton administration while he was officially running Halliburton. Seems that the distinction between “red” or “blue” didn’t matter when there was “green” involved.
We know that the liberal ny times couldn’t find an american to help keep them afloat, they had to go south of the boarder to find someone.
Like they say… mexicans do the jobs americans don’t want to do.
Of course not. Why would they with obama in the white house.
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009.....ings/12326
Do me a favor and delete this post while you can still edit it.
I don’t want to have to agree with you.
Politics is all about the green.
I’ve been reading that iTunes is still having trouble competing with music piracy and free personalized Internet radio (services like Pandora, where apparently most young people do their music listening these days), which is why their prices are dropping and they are imposing fewer restrictions on their content.
Whatever method used to distribute news online, it should be extremely cheap and as unobtrusive as possible.
Art@15: Yes, the “subscription fee” for a print publication is really just a rather poor method of tracking how many people actually read the publication.
The theory is that someone pays for a copy, they are more likely to read it (and therefore see the ads) than they are to use it simply to paper-train their dog. It prevents the publishers from “padding” their readership numbers because subscription revenues can be tracked and cross-checked (though some major publications were caught doing just that in the past few years).
is murtha one of the soldiers john kerry talked about… raping women shooting kids in the back, ripping off ears. Or more like the soldiers that were too unedukated too do anything else besides become killers.
Wasn’t it clinton appointee george tenet that said WMD were a slam dunk? Would we have gone to war if the clinton flunkee didn’t lie to the president and congress? I guess we will never know since clinton’s boy sandy berger stole and destroyed classified documents that would have shown us the truth.
I think of you more like the ox, being led around by someone much smarter than you to do work they don’t want to. Whose pulling your strings?
I’m looking forward to better document access and as AG Holder starts to look under all the rocks in the GOP closet, hopefully we’ll get the truth about some of the many Bush scandals such as Abramoff, WHATADICK Cheney’s REAL ties to Bechtel – the secret Big Energy deals WHATADICK made, the scandal of waste, fraud and abuse by Publican pals who stole from the taxpayers in Iraq and on and on and on…
Lot of green in your gravatar Stamn.
Priceless.
LOL!
Glad you like it. Metaline falls is a beautiful area of the country.
re 24: I’m not asking you to think that I am smart. But if you are going to match wits with someone, you have to have a realistic estimate of their true capabilities.
Your tiresome little feints of tit for tat fail to take into account the gravity of an offense.
To take a Biblical example, your the kind who would split the baby in half. I give you an example of an enormous crime, and you come back with ‘George Tenant was appointed by Bill Clinton, so Bill Clinton must be resposible for the Iraq war.’
I find the way your snide and superficial mind works to be hideous. You would execute a pickpocket and a mass murdere with equal avidity — because they are both criminals. Except, if the mass murderer were a Republican, you’d point at the pickpocket and say that both men are equivalent.
I would say that mentally speaking you and I are probably in the high average range. The difference between us is that you are an authoritarian personality who believes, not thinks.
Even penn jillette sees the double standard with democrats.
Dissent is patriotic when it was bush you were dissenting. Dissent about obama not so much.
I’m not trying to match wits. I’m simply pointing out facts. Unless you believe george tenet wasn’t an appointee of clinton and didn’t lie to the president and the country about WMDs being a slam dunk. So I ask, fact or not?
Lying to the president about WMDs being a slam dunk was serious. Sandy berger stealing and destroying classified documents was serious. I don’t understand how you can call those grievous offenses tit for tat.
You mean the book about a man in the sky that created everything in 6 days? Is that the giant at the top of the beanstalk that jack met?
Did I say clinton was responsibler the war or is that how you feel so that’s how you interrupted my words?
Thank you for your diagnosis. Instead of debating what I said you call me names. Typical.
And you know this how? Oh yeah, that’s how you feel so you assume others feel the same way.
Except what? That’s the same thing you said a paragraph earlier except for adding the word republican.
Probably?? I understand you don’t know me so you aren’t qualified to make a judgement about me mentally, yet you should know yourself to know what range you rank mentally.
As said by someone that quoted the bible.
Oops.
You obviously meant dianne feinstein’s (democrat) ties to bechtel.
And unlike bush that doesn’t get a vote in congress where tax dollars are spent, dianne does. And she made sure her husband profited.
Then again, there’s doing it in the manner of Seattle’s two successful newspapers:
Do a weekly print edition.
Put it in free distribution boxes at bus stops.
Put a couple of investigative-reporting pieces and a snarky editorial or two in front.
Put sex ads in the back.
Put lots of info about “other” entertainment in the middle.
Run a parallel Web edition with more frequent updates.
Work like hell, for not much money.
Goldy,
I’m not sure the “penny a click” model is the right one. I’d be hesitant to click on a link if I knew it might cost me money for something I didn’t want.
The Salon model has been copied by many a site to some success. Many sites have a “premium” membership that gets rid of ads and provides other benefits (Flickr, Slashdot, Multiply, Livejournal, etc.). The sites doing best with this are doing some form of “community” site or Web 2.0 where the interaction between regular users of the site is what makes it “sticky”. Sites mirroring the top-down model from the traditional media don’t do nearly as well.
As for advertising on the internet, you can make money with it. However the sites doing well with it: 1. Have high traffic volumes, 2. make money with pay-per-click ads not pay-per-impression, and 3. Have ad staff that work on getting well-targeted and well-paying pay-per-click ads for the site.
Another revenue source is getting paid for referrals. Examples would be a travel site that gets paid when someone books a hotel room, a restaurant review site that gets paid when someone books a table, or a price comparison site that gets paid when someone clicks to buy.
The dirty little secret is nobody is really making money off providing content except for Apple, Google, and Yahoo.
That said I do have paid subscriptions to a few sites: Cook’s Illustrated, Consumer Reports, and Wine Spectator. Access to their archives provides enough value that I’m willing to part with a bit of money every year for the privilege.
@13
Marvin, Marvin, Marvin…
If you want to go trolling the interweb for racist nutjobs who happen to be democrats, go ahead. But you linked to a guy who’s post has been up for almost two weeks and has generated ONE comment. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear, are you still an idiot for pointing out that it created soundwaves?
Just for fun, since the post you linked, that blog has posted 12 items and generated ZERO comments. I’ve showered at least seven more times in the last week than the number of people who have read that blog.
Another headlesslucy sockpuppet.
Why do you post under so many names?
If you don’t think I’m an actual person, try the google.
BTW, attacking an argument by attacking the person is unbearably lame. How do you live with yourself knowing you failed at jr. high level debate?
@36 “How do you live with yourself”
Electro-shock therapy?
@30 “judgement about me mentally”
We can leave that to a professional. Your psychotherapist will do. As recall, you were diagnosed as being, “fucked up in the head”.
@27 “Metaline falls”
I take it that the L.A. musician thing didn’t work out for you. No surpise there, of course, seeing as how you don’t even know the major scales.
Bye the bye, your town’s begging for a few million from City Light will go for naught. And we’ll follow that up by quadrupling your electricity rates. How does 12 cents per KWH sound?
I did google you site:horseses.org
Seems you post right after or right before headlesslucy.
Strange how that happens.
I was wondering in #12 how long you could go without replying to me or writing about me.
Looks like only 5 hours and 17 minutes in this thread alone.
I wonder if I tighten up the puppet strings if I can get you posting quicker.
Let’s find out.
Penn Jillette is a notorious right wing crank. I wish he were the silent one.
Marvin: If you were honest, you would not say that you are simply pointing out facts. You are cherry-picking data to support a bankrupt point of view — and doing a weak job at that.
The Apaches used to bury a live enemy in a red ant pile with only their head above ground. Then they would pour honey over the head and watch the ants slowly pick the head clean.
This happened during the Civil War quite a bit because the soldiers were too busy fighting a war to keep the Apaches in check.
Therefore, the unfortunate person in the ant pile has Jefferson Davis to blame for his misery.
These are the kind of points you make, Marvin. You are not simply stating facts.
right wing crank?
Drinking already? I guess being retired there’s not much else to do at your age.
Yes, Marvin, splitting the baby in half is exactly like Jack and the beanstalk. You are a Solomon in clowns attire, bubby.
He is a right wing crank.
So data is no longer considered a fact?
Is that part of the CHANGE obama promised.
If what I post is factually untrue, like your bullshit about penn being a “notorious right wing crank” provide a link proving otherwise.
p.s. where’s your link to prove what you wrote about penn?
re 46: The operative phrase was cherry-picking, not data. The facts that you present in a sequence do not ad up to the conclusion that you are propounding.
Fine. I’ll reason things out your way:
George W. Bush gave Tenant the medal of freedom. This fact means that Bush approves of Clinton’s political appointments.
See what I mean? You are a kook.
Whatever.
I see you didn’t post a link about penn.
I knew you wouldn’t back up what you said.
Typical with big talkers like you.
Looks like we’re up to FIVE people that lying piece of shit head of the GOP Steele paid with campaign money. I give the asshole six – 10 weeks on the job before the Publicans prove he’s just a token and throw him under the bus – which is too bad – it’s better for the Dems that the GOP is run by such an obvious crook.
Marvin – how long have you been on parole for child rape?
leadless douchy@45:
When will I see your Irv Kupicet sock puppet? Bring back Irv. At least in that persona you had some cognitive thought.
leadless douchy – John Wayne Gacy, Democratic friend of Jimmy Carter…
Google: “penn jillette and his conservative politics”
Plenty of links. He’s a right wing crank.
Ted Bundy — valued Young Republican in WA.
evn better “penn jillette is a right wing crank”
What about jim jones and jonestown.
Nothing like a lefty when it comes to killing.
Abortions, socialism, KKK, communism… all great killers on the left.
Chris @ 33: I know a gal who makes quite a bit of money off two web sites she set up several years ago. One provides articles about home schooling, and she gets a few bucks everytime somebody buys a book or supplies through the links on her site. The other one is devoted to her hometown, which is actually more of a suburb. She makes money when people look for information about the town, and end up booking hotel rooms, car rentals, etc. through links on her site. She’s not getting rich, but it brings in enough to be a resepctable full-time salary.
Her formula: find a specialty niche which has at least national appeal, work at it daily (at least two or three new articles a week to encourage return visitors), build a “community” of followers to the site, use affiliate programs to bring in revenue, and make it all trackable so she can measure success and rotate ad links accordingly. Her model is the one I am trying to emulate for my own site.
re 54: Right wing + Fascists + death camps = Marvin Stamn’s political culture.
re 54:I’ve found that I get the most response from descriptions of guitars that I’ve owned or played. Worldwide.
I should take advantage of this niche. I don’t want Penn Jillette reading it, though. He’s a right wing crank — and they are always such disagreeable assholes.
Penn Jillette has webbed toes.