On Wed, 22 Feb 1995, Edward J. Branley wrote:
> The only danger with this attitude would be if someone else would come along
> and make a list on the same subject as yours that did allow advertising.
Where's the "danger"? I don't run my list for self-aggrandizement. If the
other list was better than mine, it would "win", but that would be a
victory, not a loss, since it would be a better list.
> Again, see above. The main reason people don't set up competing lists is
> because there's no current reason for redundancy. If an enterprising person on
> the net could find a way to make a list on the same subject as yours more
> attractive in spite of advertising (and let's face it, if he's being paid by
> someone for the ads, he's going to expend a lot more brain power on this than
> you), you could find your list out in the cold. Is that a disaster? Probably
> not, since you don't spend much time maintaining the lists anyway.
It sounds like you still don't get the point. The value-added of my list
has nothing to do with me, but resides entirely in my subscribers. Your
magazine analogy is faulty for the simple reason that magazines are not
written by the same people who subscribe to them. My list, like all of
the lists I subscribe to, has little value in and of itself -- it's the
subscribers who contribute everything. All I do is make sure the sucker
gets distributed OK. Nobody reads _Newsweek_ because of who's on the
subscriber list.
There isn't any call for "brain power" in running my list; all the
brainpower goes into the writing of the articles. If no one has anything
of interest to say, then the list _should_ die. And off-charter
professionalized ads decrease the average quality of the articles.
| Steve Thornton | stevet@eskimo.com | Seattle, Washington,
USA | | Send 'subscribe indiepop' to majordomo@eskimo.com for la-la fun |
| TweeNet indiepop (and baseball): http://www.eskimo.com/~stevet/ |
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