According to news reports, INL's news website
stuff.co.nz cost them
some two million dollars last year.
I guess that old adage -- the more money you have, the more money you spend
certainly rings true when it comes to Internet-based ventures.
Now maybe my sweat-equity and entrepreneurial roots are showing here but I
find it incredible that any website along the scale of Stuff.co.nz could
cost $2m to set-up and run for a year -- particularly when the raw content
used by the site is already being produced by the print division of the
company.
Perhaps these costs were a carefully choreographed piece of accounting
with lots of intra-company billing in which the Stuff.co.nz cost-center
was required to purchase services and product from other parts of the
corporation at rates which don't actually reflect the cost of supply -- this
is not uncommon nor unreasonable when taking a holistic approach
to profits.
However, I must say that if someone gave me $2m with which to build and
run a small NZ-focused news site I'd sure as hell give them a huge wad of
change at the end of a year.
And it could hardly be said that I'm talking through a hole in my head --
after all, I created then ran 7am.com for over two years for well under a tenth
of that amount -- and at the same time built a global audience which is probably
some ten times larger than Stuff.co.nz.
Okay INL -- here's the deal: I'll run Stuff.co.nz for you and double its
audience so long -- so long as I can keep just half of the money I save you in
the process.
Not only that -- I'll show you how you can leverage your online operation to
do what few other online news operations have been able to do -- turn a
very healthy profit.
Burn That Browser?
In light of my propensity to criticise those who build websites which only
work properly when viewed through the latest version of Internet Explorer
I read
this story
from CNet with some amazement.
According to the bunch of idiots calling themselves WaSP (the Web Standards Project),
web designers are quite within their rights to discriminate against those
idle and indolent Net users who have the sheer arrogance not to be using the
latest and greatest browsers.
What a bunch of lazy sods!
I don't know what colour the sky is in their world but they clearly don't
realise that some Net users don't want to replace their Netscape 4.x with
a buggy and problematic Netscape 6. Likewise there are an increasing
number of "users" out there who are not computer literate and don't
feel confident enough to download and install a new browser. These people
are quite happy with the browser version that is presently installed on their
PC.
Also, given the rate at which Microsoft is alerted to, and plugs, holes in
its newly released browser products -- why should this group of up-starts
expect Mr and Mrs "average" to spend hours of their valuable time just downloading
and installing new browser software just to make life a little easier for
this tiny group of lazy web designers with an attitude problem?
What next -- a lobby that suggests we regularly upgrade our roads so as to
make them incompatible with last year's cars and thus force drivers to upgrade
their vehicles every few months?
Come on guys -- quit whining and just do your job properly.
The Weekly Is Downloadable
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