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an open letter to speypages/speyclave readers and participants
Dear Friends,
As many of you know the Speypages has been around in various forms since the spring of 2000. From its humble beginnings as a place for my friends to get together to talk about speycasting, it has grown to become the #1 spey-related website with thousands of visitors each month from around the world. Through this time I have weathered many storms with one goal in mind: to provide spey aficionados with a complete, one-stop spot for all things spey. I think I have achieved this goal and I am proud of where the site is today.
But things are not well in speyland. As with all things on the web, the bottom line is money. Despite the hundreds of hours I devote to this site each month, I receive no income from it. Advertising revenue pays for web hosting and a limited amount of equipment upgrades, and that’s it. I publish a spey newsletter, but the amount of time I have to devote to running the site takes me away from that focus and so I can only publish a few articles a year, and so I keep the price of that down. Still, only a small number of speypages users subscribe to the newsletter so my income from that source is very limited.
I am now at a crossroads. I cannot continue to justify to my family or myself the time I must devote to the website with zero financial reward. Things need to change. I am looking ahead to 2005 and realize that I can’t keep things going any longer. Although I have wracked my brains over the past few years thinking up solutions, I have not come up with any that seem viable. So here I stand.
The solutions as I seem them are as follows:
1. turn the speypages/speyclave into a subscription site so that all users must pay a yearly fee to access it and participate ( think this approach would likely kill the site)
2. find alternate sources of funding my time and equipment requirements, either through major sponsorship or private donors
3. close the sites down
If anyone has any other thoughts about this or would like to help out, please contact me at [email protected] or [email protected].
Dear Friends,
As many of you know the Speypages has been around in various forms since the spring of 2000. From its humble beginnings as a place for my friends to get together to talk about speycasting, it has grown to become the #1 spey-related website with thousands of visitors each month from around the world. Through this time I have weathered many storms with one goal in mind: to provide spey aficionados with a complete, one-stop spot for all things spey. I think I have achieved this goal and I am proud of where the site is today.
But things are not well in speyland. As with all things on the web, the bottom line is money. Despite the hundreds of hours I devote to this site each month, I receive no income from it. Advertising revenue pays for web hosting and a limited amount of equipment upgrades, and that’s it. I publish a spey newsletter, but the amount of time I have to devote to running the site takes me away from that focus and so I can only publish a few articles a year, and so I keep the price of that down. Still, only a small number of speypages users subscribe to the newsletter so my income from that source is very limited.
I am now at a crossroads. I cannot continue to justify to my family or myself the time I must devote to the website with zero financial reward. Things need to change. I am looking ahead to 2005 and realize that I can’t keep things going any longer. Although I have wracked my brains over the past few years thinking up solutions, I have not come up with any that seem viable. So here I stand.
The solutions as I seem them are as follows:
1. turn the speypages/speyclave into a subscription site so that all users must pay a yearly fee to access it and participate ( think this approach would likely kill the site)
2. find alternate sources of funding my time and equipment requirements, either through major sponsorship or private donors
3. close the sites down
If anyone has any other thoughts about this or would like to help out, please contact me at [email protected] or [email protected].