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---Wait For The Music---Go Full Screen--- The Dan Daily Sites
When Only The Best! Will Do...
Laughter is the Sun that Drives Winter from the Human Face. Please Spread It Around...
Good Morning All! "The Never Ending Bandwidth Nightmare!"
Dear Danny ... Loved today's e-zine... Please don't go conglomerate on us! I'm sure you've had offers but that would be a quick way to mediocrity. As far as your decision on how to solve the bandwidth problem, I commend you. It is a fair decision. I can imagine how much thought and anguish you went through in making the decision. I know how seriously you take allowing your baby to actually shut down, even temporarily. I bet you even looked at your bank
account ... LOL ... Thanks for being you...
This Is a Long Read: Read It, and You'll Understand!
Dear Di, Did I check my bank account and agonize over this decision? No, not at all, not this time; I've developed a healthy attitude about it. When I cut the free content 5 months ago, that was really tough: But I'm glad I did it. The paid subscriber to free hit rate had fallen to 8%. This was financially unsustainable: After I cut the content, I picked up more subscribers and total bandwidth use dropped. The subscriber to free hit rate went up to 22%. That means; out of the total hits the sites were getting, 22% of them were paying members. This to me is a comfortable number. I wanted to see it go up to 25%: It didn't do that... I pick up new paying subscribers at a slow, but steady pace. (sounds good) Unfortunately, viewer ship growth to the free sites is neither. Last month, the traffic to the site increased 500 hits a day within a four day period; and now, another 500 as of last week and it's sustained itself. That's 35,000 new hits a month or almost another 400,000 additional hits a year! And believe me, I didn't pick up 500 new paying subscribers, or even 50! Had I, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. I'd of automatically bought higher bandwidth allotments like so many times before. In the past, I never had to worry about peaks: They would always fall back down and level off to just a hair above normal levels. Not anymore... This fact has caused the pay to free ratio to drop down to 10% even. Right back where I started from: This cannot stand. The only choices are to cut even more free content, which quite frankly, there's not much left to cut, (I refuse to cut the entire tips section) or let the bandwidth run out and close them down until the next monthly cycle starts. I have no problem purchasing even more bandwidth, (for the fifth time) but only when the hit ratio is back to a sustainable level. The Dan Daily free sites, even now, enjoys almost 25 times the bandwidth that any normal site could ever use. And it's not enough... You should see my hands shake when I sign those contracts! But, so far at least, you've never let me down. Renewal rates are very healthy but only sustain what is, not what will be. 20% is the magic number for healthy long term growth. It's amazing how quickly the 10% cushion disappears. All the "Everything for free," or hate mail in the world doesn't change this basic fact. I'm really glad my "real" job has nothing to do with computers or the web. This allows these issues to be very clear: Very Black and White, if you will... Allowing the temporary closing of the free sites has two benefits: People will get tired of it and join the members sites, or people will get tired of it and never return. Either way, it solves the problem. As it's always been, it's the peoples choice, not mine: I don't care if The Dan Daily Sites becomes a "conglomerate" mega site or not. I long for the days when we were a small, tight unit. My server folks are in utter shock over the huge growth the sites have seen in the last year. They've never seen anything like it. In the not too distant future, I'll be buying bandwidth blocks from where they buy it. Not from them! They support over 200 sites. I'm just one... That's the precipice we find ourselves at. At those levels, there is no going back. These are very serious commitments. Very scary commitments I can assure you... One thing's for sure; if it does go mega, it'll be because it paid it's way: Not because I just threw money at it. We all have to pay our way: The Dan Daily Sites is no exception, it's not a baby anymore. I'm perfectly happy with it the way it is. "Build it and they will come," is not the same as "Build it and they will support it." LOL So many thousands of dot coms thought they were the same thing. Well, unlike them, I'm still here... Reader growth at any cost is just a one way ticket to a black screen. What's a royal pain for me is the administration and monitoring of The Dan Daily Sites has become much more of a priority then anything else. This doesn't sit well with me. I skipped some Tuesday issues this month because of this problem. Had I not skipped the issues, the free sites would have closed a week ago. Skipping issues is not fair to the paying members. Thus yesterdays mailing to you guys: You members will continue to get new Danny's Daily's issues regardless of what state the free sites are in at the time. If and when I publish. I've come to realize that anyone can start a web site. If you're really good at it, keeping the web site is the tricky part. Everything is money now, everything has changed. I'm making quite a few people a lot of money and one of them isn't me! I also support all the sites I visit regularly and would hope everyone would. I do it so I can do my part to help keep them viable. I, more then anybody, realize just how hard this is. One of my favorite pages, (the Osama shoot em up game) has bellied up for the third and final time. He couldn't figure out a way to have paying subscribers. He had no model for it: The game was all he had. He relied on ads and now is gone forever. This breaks my heart because I really loved his game. Bin Laden Liquors would have been PERFECT for my members sites. Controlled viewer ship: I should have stolen it. Now it's gone forever... I've said it before, and I'll say it until I'm blue in the face: This WILL NOT happen to The Dan Daily Sites. All the "Everything for free," or hate mail in the world won't change that either. Commercial web sites and sites like mine are very different. With some exceptions, commercial sites pitch for a non web product. They are basically losers, essentially. If a business decides to have a web presence, it's a lost leader and has to be thought of in those terms always. Had it been, there would have been no dot com boom or bust. Even the majors like Yahoo, E-bay, or even the AOL site itself, are selling products NOT related to the web at all. The web is only the vehicle TO those products. The Dan Daily Sites, on the other hand, IS the product. Do you see the difference? It's great entertainment and dirt cheap at that. It's its own entity and can't afford to be a lost leader or a lost anything. Getting people to visit the site, versus getting them to support the site is a very thin tight rope and the source of many a migraine over here, I can assure you. And God! How I hate begging for members! I feel like those clowns on Public Television. The difference is, I don't enjoy a HUGE Government grant to blow every year. One thing I've come to realize: These problems will never really go away. I'm reminded of the Sept. 11th nightmare. MSNBC.com's site traffic quadrupled. That's ratings to them and you'd think it would be a good thing. They had to lay off 9 people to pay for the bandwidth. And that's MSNBC! That's the reality of the Internet today. I have to be totally vigilant at all times to every trend, every referral, every search engine. I have to be able to spot the trends before they haunt me. It would be easy to say, "just write the checks." I wish it was as simple as that: I can't allow it to become the money pit it so desperately wants to be. I give enough; this computer, the redundant arrays required for security, the software programs to make this all happen, the PO box, the store front, the PayPal accounts, the original outlays for the servers and my uncountable hours spent on these publications. My personal debt is where I draw the line... The rest is up to the readers. It shuts down before I go broke. Simple as that. Danny's Daily's is by far, one of the longest lived and most respected e-zines on the Internet today. This eternal vigilance, insures it's tomorrow. So Far, I'm up to it. Thanks for your email
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