Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 13:18:24 -0500

From: Evan Morris words1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]WORD-DETECTIVE.COM

Subject: Re: RE American Popular Speech



I think APSO is a great idea, but I also agree with Grant:



At 10:32 AM 12/12/97 -0500, Grant Barrett wrote:



Some thoughts about your American Popular Speech Online concept:



-- I think I detect some hyperactive overpromoting on your part just for

the sake of getting people interested so I won't really address your

way-high estimates of hits per day.



-- I don't imagine that we would be able to pay anyone a cent based on the

revenues received from banner advertising. Being professionally interested

in online advertising, I can tell you for certain that there are oodles of

sites receiving 50,000 hits a day (about 10,000 unique visitors) that have

a difficult time finding advertisers.





Yup, you'd better forget advertising. A pledge/subscription scheme might

well generate some minimal income, but the site would have to be a labor of

love. Some more revenue might be generated by affiliating with amazon.com

and establishing an online bookstore annex to APSO, which would give you a

small cut (5-10%) of books sold through the site. This is easy to set up.



-- It seems to me that you spend a large part of your day reading yellowed

newspapers and fending off "hi!" chats from 13-year-old AOL users, so you

must have some idea of how much time it would take to put together

something like American Popular Speech Online. It's all the problems of a

magazine and a software publisher combined.



-- That said, where do I sign up? I'll donate my time, web server space

and my pen.





Hear, hear. Go for it, Barry. As I've said before, I think that your

stuff (and much of what other folks post here, let alone what they'd write

if given a forum such as APSO) is too good to relegate to the ADS-L

archives.

--

Evan Morris

words1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]word-detective.com

http://www.word-detective.com