Articles

[Stuart Sibley]

I want to see Factplace stay up. How big a contribution could assure its survival in the long run? I put up some stuff in the economics area, 'cause I was reading it anyway. What do you feel could best help the site grow? Do you want original articles, or is cut-n-paste from around the web good enough? I read a lot, and so does Mark, and I don't think it is much trouble to grab an interesting story from the headlines and upload it here. In the NASCAR area, I could grab stories from ESPN. Who is our target market?

[bschorr]

I want to see Factplace stay up. How big a contribution could assure its survival in the long run? I put up some stuff in the economics area, 'cause I was reading it anyway. What do you feel could best help the site grow? Do you want original articles, or is cut-n-paste from around the web good enough? I read a lot, and so does Mark, and I don't think it is much trouble to grab an interesting story from the headlines and upload it here. In the NASCAR area, I could grab stories from ESPN. Who is our target market?

Well, actually two things:

1) The forums aren't really our target area. I don't generate any revenue from them since there are no ads (and no fees, of course). The area that generates revenue (such as it is) are the articles out on the main part of the site (http://www.factplace.com). For there I'd want original articles and/or links to other articles. I run into copyright issues if I upload entire articles from elsewhere. The forums serve two purposes:

A) They offer a place for folks who are passionate abot a topic to participate and hopefully come back to the site again and again. As you can see there aren't a tremendous number of those people; though I've probably impeded them (both of them) by aggressively locking out the spammers.

B) It's a home for the ILink refugees. This is really it's main purpose. I need to see what I can do to ease the new account restrictions on the off chance that we ever get a new participant.

2) FactPlace isn't in any real danger of shutting down - right now it's not quite a break-even sort of enterprise, but the costs are relatively low. I was just hoping that you interesting and smart folks might have a few interesting and smart paragraphs that I could put up on the site that might increase the traffic a bit so that it might become a break-even situation.

No need for monetary contributions. I probably lose something on the order of $10 a year or something which is an expense I can gladly absorb. Would rather make a $10 a year profit, though.

-B-