considering internet/privacy periodical

I'm considering putting together a periodic publication about the technical
and legal aspects of privacy and the Internet. My "business model" would
feature free WWW/email access with a charge for fax or postal delivery. I'm
curious to know if this strikes people as interesting or just Yet Another
Email Newsletter Of No Real Consequence. (no offense taken if it's the
latter.)

Any feedback is appreciated. 

 
--
Greg Broiles                |  "We pretend to be their friends,
gbroiles@netbox.com         |   but they fuck with our heads."
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles |
                            |

At 10:31 pm -0500 10/27/96, Timothy C. May wrote:
> No doubt "Wired" the magazine is doing well
> (though not amongst many of _us_, it would seem--or at least that we
> _admit_ here), but apparently "HotWired" and "Suck" and all the rest are
> having trouble finding their niche. Ditto for Michael Kinsley's
> massively-touted "Slate." And a bunch of other such Web rags (no pun
> intended, but it's not a bad one, eh?).

Actually, the report I heard on "Marketplace", NPR's business report, said
that the market looked at the fact that Wired was more magazine than
internet, and killed the deal, twice now. Magazine publishing is a known
quantity, and a pretty much marginal one, too, with all the competition for
shelfspace and mindshare in the modern magazine business. Wired lost, if I
remember the story right, $10mil last year. It seems to me that a magazine
successful enough to do an IPO should have actually made money before the
stock floats. (On the other hand, magazines can live forever without ever
without making money. The greater fool theory of magazine publishing, I
guess. The Nation, never more than a century old, has never made money. The
National Review has been around since the 50's and might have made money
only few years in all that time. I don't think either one of them are
public, though...)

I guess that, like backhoes, Wall Street now also understands that Moore's
Law doesn't apply to printing presses, either. ;-).

The first Wired Ventures IPO went out as a magazine and bombed. The next
Wired Ventures deal went out as half magazine, half HotWired (though mostly
magazine in fact), and bombed. By the time Wired goes out with a new deal
-- if ever, and probably just HotWired spun off, if so -- internet hysteria
on Wall Street, currently waning, will be all but over. Deals take a long
time to ramp up. No Moore's law in industrial corporate finance, either.
(Microintermediating underwriter-bots notwithstanding, I suppose. ;-))


As for Greg's plans, I'd say do it because you love it, Greg. There's
certainly no real money in e$pam for me at the moment, but I have a small
but loyal bunch of subscribers who tell me all the time how useful it is
for them. Every once in a while, some speaking, contracting, or writing
thing comes out of it.  In the meantime, Vinnie, Rachel Wilmer, and I, and
now Anthony Templar and Fearghas McKay, keep trying out new and better ways
to wring a little money out of the content (or services, I suppose) that we
provide, if only to pay for the time and resources we've invested in it.
And, of course, for the tweakier stuff we want to do next. :-).  At some
point, for instance, we're going to try an ecash-based "begging bowl" URL,
pointing to an ecash payment page, on all the messages for e$pam and also
on the archive site we're putting up. Variable pricing, indeed.

Anyway, I think those of us doing web/mail publishing stuff like this are
doing it to say we did it, to be there first if we do something that
actually pays off. Not quite placer mining, but probably the same idea.
Like Levi Strauss and Sutter's Mill, however, it might be better business
mining the miners. If, of course, you can figure out what *that* is.
Building routers, maybe? :-). At least Moore's law applies there.

The people who keep doing it, however, are the ones who do it simply
because they like it. And, for the moment, that's why I'm doing it.
Actually, at this point, I probably can't stop. ;-).


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga



-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson
The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

Robert Hettinga writes:
> 
> At 10:31 pm -0500 10/27/96, Timothy C. May wrote:
> > No doubt "Wired" the magazine is doing well
> > (though not amongst many of _us_, it would seem--or at least that we
> > _admit_ here), but apparently "HotWired" and "Suck" and all the rest are
> > having trouble finding their niche. Ditto for Michael Kinsley's
> > massively-touted "Slate." And a bunch of other such Web rags (no pun
> > intended, but it's not a bad one, eh?).
> 
> Actually, the report I heard on "Marketplace", NPR's business report, said
> that the market looked at the fact that Wired was more magazine than
> internet, and killed the deal, twice now. Magazine publishing is a known
> quantity, and a pretty much marginal one, too, with all the competition for
> shelfspace and mindshare in the modern magazine business. Wired lost, if I
> remember the story right, $10mil last year.

Hmm.  From what I hear from publishing industry people, the magazine
part is making a lot of money, and the other parts of wIrEd is pissing
it all away... the MSNBC people, with whom wIrEd is supposed to
do a show, are pissed off at them because the wIrEd people don't
understand video production and are wasting huge amounts of time.

> It seems to me that a magazine
> successful enough to do an IPO should have actually made money before the
> stock floats. 

That's true of most IPOs. :-)

Wired problem is that they beleive their own hype.  They also think
that everything that they touch will be as successful as the magazine, which
set all kinds of records in the publishing industry for how fast it
became profitable and got advertising $$$.

However the real problem with the IPO is that Louis Rosetto sent
a 'rah rah' email to employees (all 330 of them), telling them how
great wIrEd is and how much money they're all going to make, which
got leaked out and posted on the Well among other places.  Unfortunately
for him, this is the 'quiet period' before the IPO where SEC regs
say that the company officers can't make huge glowing pronouncements
about their company.  Oops.


-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03  92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF

At 4:36 PM -0800 10/27/96, Greg Broiles wrote:
>I'm considering putting together a periodic publication about the technical
>and legal aspects of privacy and the Internet. My "business model" would
>feature free WWW/email access with a charge for fax or postal delivery. I'm
>curious to know if this strikes people as interesting or just Yet Another
>Email Newsletter Of No Real Consequence. (no offense taken if it's the
>latter.)
>
>Any feedback is appreciated.

EXECTUTIVE SUMMARY (as they say): Don't do it. The world doesn't need yet
another cyberspace events newsletter, even one focussed on "legal aspects
of privacy and the Internet" (as if we don't have these already).



Inasmuch as I respect Greg's views, and inasmuch as he drove down from
Oregon for one of my parties, I'll make some comments.

I think we're _drowning_ in Net- and Web-based "zines," newsletters, hot
and hip sites, and crud. More than just Sturgeon's law, it's an explosion
of self-published crap. All well and good, as some may find something of
interest, or so the theory goes.

However, consider the meltdown in the "Wired Ventures" plans for an IPO:
cancelled on Friday for the second time in the past several months. The
chief underwriter reported a "lack of interest," even at the reduced
offering price. (A lot of Wired, HotWired, Suck, and other paperholders are
undoubtedly not too pleased.) No doubt "Wired" the magazine is doing well
(though not amongst many of _us_, it would seem--or at least that we
_admit_ here), but apparently "HotWired" and "Suck" and all the rest are
having trouble finding their niche. Ditto for Michael Kinsley's
massively-touted "Slate." And a bunch of other such Web rags (no pun
intended, but it's not a bad one, eh?).

The latest "Wired," in fact, has an article by Josh Quittner--known to we
Cypherpunks as the reporter who showed up at an early CP meeting, and wrote
about it for "Newsday"--on the adventures of the "Sucksters."
(www.suck.com, as I recall). Josh writes (and maybe runs, I only skimmed
the article in the bookstore, as I do with "Wired") for the "Netly News."
The article somewhat longwindedly gets into the problems these "hot sites"
are having. The lack of loyalty, the lack of _payment_, etc.

(And a comment I made many months ago, about how I routinely "don't even
see" the Web ads placed on Web pages, has since been vindicated by a study
showing that the payback for Web advertising is just not there; it appears
that a whole lot of other people besides me are oblivious to these ads.
This leaves almost no payment system for online journals and hot
sites....advertising doesn't work, people won't buy subscriptions...doesn't
leave much, does it?)

Declan writes for some of these Web rags, so he can provide even more
comments. He has his own list or zine, "Fight Censorship," so his views may
differ from mine.

But Greg probably already knows about all these things. If he thinks
there's a market, maybe there is.

But how would this differ from the mailings sent out by some of the folks
on the Cyberia-l list, and similar forums? The Cyberia-l list itself, the
site at the George Marshall Law School (Trubow, as I recall), various
mailings by David Post, and the flood of press releases, Web pages,
newswire stories, etc.?

Isn't yet another newsletter a bit of an anachronism in the age of search
engines, news services out the wazoo (and out the Yahoo), etc.

In short, it seems unnecessary. And it's unlikely to make enough money to
even pay the modem bill.

Just my opinion.

--Tim May


"The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM
that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology."
[NYT, 1996-10-02]
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

At 7:58 am -0500 10/28/96, Robert Hettinga wrote:
> guess. The Nation, never more than a century old, has never made money. The
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Obviously, I only needed one "never" in that sentence. Which one, I leave
as an excercise for the reader. ;-).

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga



-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson
The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/