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