Let's see, "small" (5M) sites usually go for about $20/month. Forget about freebies (like from Geocities), because they're getting full of annoying pop-up ads that make people like me go Ugh! and go away. An e-mail account for posting and organizing that site, another $20/mo. If you don't live somewhere that has unmetered local phone lines, probably another $10-$15 per month. Then, there's the biggest cost of all, the one that has kept anyone to-date from just going ahead and creating a newsletter: TIME. Good sites take lots of it, and ones thrown up because "anyone can do it" look exactly like it.
As a reference, my main site, which includes about 6 sub-sites (my Pages being one), uses about 70M of disk space. I should be paying about $200 per month, except that I have a guardian angel inside the ISP.
> >Simple fact is that less that 20% of the target membership will be on
> > the net. . . . Why throw away 80% of your membership before you even
> start?
Simple. Make your newsletter, from the beginning, as a web site. Skip the very-tempting cutesies that you see everywhere else: they are not portable across media, and are generally content-free. Feel free to make it look like a website, though ("Oh, this is from the Internet, eh?") Actively strive to get the site known, and stress to readers that the work is to be printed and handed around freely. Give contributors a template for submissions, so that the poor bugger that has to hang it all together can stay with it all, or can share the load in a coordinated fashion. Prompt the local non-computerized people to help you write an article together so that "you, too can be on the Internet." Actively solicit contributions from Listers that seem to have a story in them. Bribe someone to get them loaded with a court stenographer close by, in their garage. Actively strive to get the site known, and stress to readers that the work is to be printed and handed around freely.
Simple as a rebuild, really.
What I wonder about: there is a virtual newsletter out there already, between Higgins' and Russell's sites, plus TEAE and all the others. How much of this stuff gets printed for the benefit of those un-wired Beamers out there?
Both groups can be served fairly well if considered from the start. But, for a new venture like this, everyone who hears about it will be wired already. Anyone they want to share it with will be close at hand already. Anyone who doesn't know wouldn't know anyway, and wouldn't find it any other way, and would have to hear about it from someone who was already wired. There's no 80% to lose, because they would never be there anyway.
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