We saw this at Stomped and followed it to link to a page at COMBATSIM.COM that explained it all.

"COMBATSIM.COM is going to become a subscriber-only site. Huh? Say again? In a few days, if you want to read articles on this site or participate on the forums, you will have to buy a subscription. The subscription fee will be $3.95 US per month. If you pay by credit card and stay subscribed with us for six months, we'll reduce the monthly renewal fee to $2.95 per month."

COMBATSIM.COM covers combat flight sims, and much to our surprise given the recent lack of sales success of that genre, is apparently pulling in huge traffic.

"Never before has COMBATSIM.COM been so popular a web site. Last month, as I mentioned above, we had over 14 million page views---an amazing increase from our previous (and typical) month of 4 million page views. What's more, we expect to surpass even the 14 million page view milestone this month."

Those truly are huge numbers, surpassing by far most gaming sites. The problem is that they're not getting advertising revenue to offset their costs. So they either have to close the doors or find a new source of revenue, so they're seeing if a subscription model will work. If you've followed the web advertising business at all, then you know that this market is really being hit hard. Advertisers are not happy with the effectiveness of ads and too many commercial websites are competing for ad dollars, which has resulted in a steep decline in ad revenue for many commercial networks and websites. Add in to this mix the collapse of the dot coms who were some of the busiest web advertisers, and it's the portrait of Dorian Gray we're looking at.

So can COMBATSIM.COM pull off what larger publications have been unable to do? Get their readers to pay for access? We see this as being a bit risky. First, we're all conditioned to avoid paying for content on the web. So far only the pornographic sites have been successful in getting people to pay, and we doubt a P-51 has the same allure as a Pamela. Second, a healthy chunk of COMBATSIM.COM's traffic is from message boards. Yahoo and plenty of other sites offer free message boards. Third, $3.95 per month is fairly expensive. It's more than a game magazine subscription. Finally, won't there be new sites that will spring up offering many of the same features for free?

So how do you feel about this kind of revenue model for gaming sites? Would you support it? Run away from it? Click here to comment, and no, it's not something we're contemplating.

Comments?

I think it's the wrong way to go. Some sites like NYT and WSJ requires membership in order to read the articles. It might be ok with them because they have high traffic and "important" articles.
With a "community" type site it's a less good idea.

A much better way, the American way :), is to sell merchandise and open up a shop with special goods to those interested. Why not have cups/t-shirts with combatsim:s logo instead? Or t-shirts with "cool" quotes? That's what we plan to do with our site in the future. Let's see if quartertothree picks up on this too :).

Marcus

Well, I'm not going to combatsim.com anymore.

(sigh)

Generally when I'm getting into a flight sim I check there daily. Lately I've been playing more RPG's and strategy so I haven't been reading it.

Now they want me to pay for it? Ain't gonna happen. I'm an on-again, off-again flight simmer. I'm not going to pay for the months when I'm not playing a flight sim, and cancelling and resubscribing is too much of a pain.

Here's hoping QuarterToThree lets us know in a month or two when combatsim drops this idea (or dies, I guess).

Dean

"A much better way, the American way :), is to sell merchandise and open up a shop with special goods to those interested. Why not have cups/t-shirts with combatsim:s logo instead? Or t-shirts with "cool" quotes? That's what we plan to do with our site in the future. Let's see if quartertothree picks up on this too :)."

Heh -- I'm not sure the kind of profits a site like ours could realize from selling t-shirts is worth the trouble. If we ever do shirts, and we might mainly because we like our eyeball logo, it would be with the idea of getting some walking billboards rather than a revenue stream.

On most of our pages we have that CNET Game Shopper thing. If we weren't affliated with CNET and getting revenue based on traffic from them, we'd probably make more hooking up with a game seller as a way of generating some revenue rather than selling shirts and mugs. I don't think we get anything from the Game Shopper box -- maybe $0.02 a click-through, but I'm not sure. Of course, the problem with selling games through an editorial site is that it raises some questions about possible bias. Plenty of sites do it, though. It's not unethical. You just have to be careful.

If COMBATSIM is able to pull this off, they'll be bucking the trend. $3.95 per month seems awfully high to me, though. If they get 2000 subscribers, that's $80,000 per month! That's a lot of money!

One of the real dangers I see for them is that their message boards might decline. I'm guessing that they have extremely active boards, and if the number of people who use the boards drop dramatically, then the content on the boards will also diminish.

Also, if they are indeed getting 14 million page views a month, you can bet that some new site will spring up now to attempt to attract those readers. PlanetFlightSim? COMBATSIM has a tough sell ahead of them.

Dean, your point about not paying for months when you're not flight simming is also a good one. What we need is a good system of micropayments. If you could go to their site and pay $0.50 for one week's access, that might be attractive to you.

And finally, another side of all this is that web advertising is probably going to change. CNET's already hinted to us that we may have to do a page redesign at some point. Everyone's trying to figure out how to make ad banners more effective without being more annoying.

(And just so people understand how all this works for us -- we don't sell any ads. All we do is create content and manage the site. CNET is 100% responsible for the ads on our site. They just appear magically from their server. Heh.)

It's an interesting gamble, but one that may pay off considering their userbase. Since wargamers have shown a penchant for purchasing online (Combat Mission), and flight-simmers have a similar issue with finding a place to go for their fix, they may see $3.95 as no big deal.

Heck, a lot of these guys pay for things like Warbirds and the old Air Warrior, etc. $3.95 must be a drop in the bucket by comparison.

I think it's also good to note that most of their target audience is probably older and has plenty of cash. The reason wargames and sims are slowly fading away is because the market is shrinking. Kids don't play "war" anymore with their buddies because we're so far removed from those conflicts. Jet planes, tanks, etc. seem kind of "old" technoligically these days. But there's a huge group of dedicated gamers out there that want these genres to continue and like I said, probably have the money to pay for this.

I guess we and they will find out soon enough if there's enough cash for it or if their userbase was just the same 140,000 guys hitting the site 100 times a day. :)

It makes me worry about my favorite sites. If sites are pulling in good numbers (and a subsequent big bandwidth bill) but the bottom has fallen out of the banner market, then how do they support themselves? Sounds like Q23 has worked it out via CNET hosting, but the Combatsim guy makes it sound like those deals are fading away. We have seen the loss of a few of those hosting networks, so it is possible more could fail. Hopefully not, as I think that will leave us with Walmart.com & that's it.

I won't be subscribing to Combatsim because I shifted over to SimHQ a while back. I had written a couple of pieces for John Sponauer's M1TP2 fansite, and when he went to work at SimHQ I followed him over there. John's love for armor sims shows in the site, and I much prefer armor sims to flight sims (I was going to be a beta tester for M1TP3 until those Hasbro bastards came along & bought Microprose). Armor sim fans - now THERE is a big market! ;)

---

Quote:

Dean, your point about not paying for months when you're not flight simming is also a good one. What we need is a good system of micropayments. If you could go to their site and pay $0.50 for one week's access, that might be attractive to you.

---

CombatSim is going to die.

They may be getting huge hits, but, frankly, its more along the lines of simmers surfing through quickly than anything they are willing to pay for. Nobody is going to pay $4/month to post on message boards (which, although busy, tend to have the same names and faces posting there, albeit proliferously).

CS is, essentially, riding the wave of when it used to be THE ONLY real sim site out there. Every simmer used to RELIGIOUSLY hang around CS (as well as Rod White's old site). They had the content. These days, this isn't the same. We've got a plethora of sim sites out there, who offer content whose quality easily rivals or exceeds CombatSim's (Sim-Arena, Dogfighter, Bombs-Away, Sim-HQ, hell, even Eurogamer has a nice BoB review up by a newsgroup regular, Ian Boys). These sites, while smaller, are more streamlined, and, when you add the content together, you get a better picture of sim news and community than Other Site [tm] could ever provide. (E.g. if I hear about a new Falcon patch, I don't go to CS first.)

It's a shame. The CombatSim management (a soap opera if there was one) basically pissed away their window of opportunity to make money -- when the advertisers where still biting -- and now that simming is essentially going underground, they're whining that their big, expensive site can't survive without us footing the bill for (likely) a decreased amount of content and message boards. I stopped paying for the privledge to post on the CI$ Flight Sim Forum a long, long time ago, Len.

Contrary to what it may sound like, I don't want Other Site [tm] to die (even though I've had more than one nasty disagreement with them). I just don't want to pay for their life support.

--scharmers

"proliferously"? Okay Dubya! Whatever you say! ;)

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Wumpus, don't piss me off.

--scharmers

"What we need is a good system of micropayments."

That has been the new Internet revenue buzzword for a while, now. The problem is that what it's trying to capture is a tiny revenue stream from a large base of customers, each of which presumably would be paying a large number of sites for the privilege of reading their content. This creates a problem because people will find themselves billed by thirty different sites each month. How many people are willing to let themselves (a) be tracked like that; (b) make sure one of those thirty isn't ripping them off; and (c) continually register with new sites for content? Imagine getting thirty separate line items on your credit card bill just from web sites, in addition to all the usual stuff?

The answer is to create a "web pay account" along the lines of Microsoft Passport where you have a central repository than records all your usage/payment info, but I don't think the public is ready for this yet. Pay-for-content is coming in some form or another, but only when the technology and public attitude are there to make the transition painless.

If they think 14 million page views a month is amazing, they're not going to handle 14 page views a month very well. Because that's all they can expect to get.

Yes, it'd be nice if we could all get paid directly for working on Web sites, but it's not going to happen. And they'll find that out soon enough after some subscriber starts pirating their material and redistributes it for free.

"Heck, a lot of these guys pay for things like Warbirds and the old Air Warrior, etc. $3.95 must be a drop in the bucket by comparison."

Except if they're already paying for those, will they want to pay for something else, especially if there are rival sites that are free?

snip

"I guess we and they will find out soon enough if there's enough cash for it or if their userbase was just the same 140,000 guys hitting the site 100 times a day. :)"

At $4 per month, they only need a couple of thousand subscribers. I suspect that the boards were a big draw, and when traffic there drops off, they're in trouble.

"It makes me worry about my favorite sites. If sites are pulling in good numbers (and a subsequent big bandwidth bill) but the bottom has fallen out of the banner market, then how do they support themselves? Sounds like Q23 has worked it out via CNET hosting, but the Combatsim guy makes it sound like those deals are fading away. We have seen the loss of a few of those hosting networks, so it is possible more could fail. Hopefully not, as I think that will leave us with Walmart.com & that's it."

I don't understand why COMBATSIM didn't hook up with a network. The economics work like this -- most networks pay about a $3 CPM, which is $3 per thousand ad banners shown. So if they had a deal like that, with 14 million page impressions (not hits, which are different), they'd make about $42,000 per month. If you're a single site, you need to affliate.

Now, that said, the networks are in trouble. Gamefan died. IGN (Snowball) is in trouble. Gamers.com has had layoffs. So has Gamespy. UGO is rumored to be losing money. CNET's the only one making money that I know of.

So yes, you may be right in being worried. Some sites will survive, but we may see a lot go under.

Of course there are plenty of sites that are run as labors of love. Those will survive as well.

"It's too bad, really, because I think micropayments could be huge. Sure, $3.95 a month is patently ridiculous, but how about 5 cents per article? Unfortunately it will have to remain a pipe dream. It'll be a long time before the banking infrastructure is in place to accomodate a neat-o system like that.

"It would be nice, though, if CombatSim picked some fledgling micropayment service and went that route rather than this one-- which is almost guaranteed to fail."

Yep. Paypal is the closest we have. We need a system that makes users feel secure, which might mean giving them the option to pay by check while the service they use makes the initial payment to the third party involved. If I could make 40 micropayments of $0.25 apiece each month to differnt sites but not actually pay until I wrote a check at month's end, that would appeal to me.

I'd support it, with reservations. I'm clearly not going to subscribe to a ton of sites. But I'd cheerfully give lumthemad.net a buck or two a month.

I'm not interested in something like micropayments because of the administrative burden (on me) of keeping track of how many sites I'm visiting and how much I'm spending. In the old days before the internet I did that with Genie and CompuServe, and I am not anxious to return to that.

I still think sites would have to be free to get started, though. They'd have to convince me of their value before I'd subscribe.

"I'd support it, with reservations. I'm clearly not going to subscribe to a ton of sites. But I'd cheerfully give lumthemad.net a buck or two a month."

Yeah, Lum does a good job.

"I'm not interested in something like micropayments because of the administrative burden (on me) of keeping track of how many sites I'm visiting and how much I'm spending. In the old days before the internet I did that with Genie and CompuServe, and I am not anxious to return to that."

I'd like to see it work like a credit card, sort of. I'd sign up with the service and tell them how much each month I'd want to spend -- let's say $15 -- and then they'd reject any attempts to exceed that monthly limit on my part without my authorization via email or phone. In other words, some real-time credit checking would have to be done when I try to access COMBATSIM.COM to see if I can throw $0.25 at them to view some articles. If I'm under the $15, the payment goes through and I get to view the material. If I'm not under, I get rejected and the access is denied.

"I still think sites would have to be free to get started, though. They'd have to convince me of their value before I'd subscribe."

I suspect the model would be to have part of the site free and part of it pay-only, which seems like another mistake COMBATSIM.COM is making.

"We've got a plethora of sim sites out there, who offer content whose quality easily rivals or exceeds CombatSim's (Sim-Arena, Dogfighter, Bombs-Away, Sim-HQ, hell, even Eurogamer has a nice BoB review up by a newsgroup regular, Ian Boys). These sites, while smaller, are more streamlined, and, when you add the content together, you get a better picture of sim news and community than Other Site [tm] could ever provide. (E.g. if I hear about a new Falcon patch, I don't go to CS first.)"

And this is yet another problem. As Bruce said, once you bookmark sites, it's no more troublesome to go from one to another as it is to navigate within a site.

COMBATSIM.COM is thinking that $4 per month isn't much, and they're right. It just doesn't compare well to free, which is what the competition offers.

Bruce is also right when he says that the psychology has to change before pay sites can make it. I just wonder if it ever will? Putting content on the web is so cheap that if there's even miniscule ad revenue to be had, that may be enough to keep most sites free and therefore kill pay sites.

"Of course, the problem with selling games through an editorial site is that it raises some questions about possible bias."

Nah, youve got adds to a shopping service, you dont review those. I might get suspicous if you plasterd the site wiht like StarCraft adds... but i wouldnt worry about gameshoper.com

"Heh -- I'm not sure the kind of profits a site like ours could realize from selling t-shirts is worth the trouble. If we ever do shirts, and we might mainly because we like our eyeball logo, it would be with the idea of getting some walking billboards rather than a revenue stream. "

If you had just 1 million users you prolly really could make a quick killing with tee shirts and stuff but you would need a constant supply of new users to keep it going. Selling tee shirts is much more of a break even and pray someone will wear it to a computer show where it could get seen. As for Q23 shirts, yhea i think i would buy one i like the eyeball and i really love the sites name cause its oh so true!! And if you could aviod the copyright infringment thing you could definatly sell Shoot Club Tee's. The site is farily new thoguh so i woulndt think you would have the fan base to break even yet..

"Micropayment"
I could see this working like a Check card you put your money in the checking account (or site account) and each time you need to a quick scan gets you what you need, but a centralized acount means privacy issues and a decentralized account system means hassles. Besides that i already pay 20 bucks a month for internet acssess i dont think id b willing to but down any money to visit induvidual sites.

"I think it's also good to note that most of their target audience is probably older and has plenty of cash. The reason wargames and sims are slowly fading away is because the market is shrinking. Kids don't play "war" anymore with their buddies because we're so far removed from those conflicts."

A few years ago i would agree with you. I started playing stragey games when i was 9 and back then that was unheard of most of the strategey gamers were around 35; but i think most of them had been playing various board games scine they were teens, now scine there is a better platform readily aviliable more teens are making the jump directly to the computer wargames i have noticed a large in crease in the level of highschool-college players over the last 2 years. Not the majority quite yet but lets face it teens are the largest fraction of gammers overall and (altohguh i cant figure out how they do it) represent a huge buying power. Trust me war is on the rise!

Teens also have a big influence on the net but they are limited in thier buying power here becuase most dont have credit cards. I think this is a large part of the reason why advertisers are unsatisfied with thier click-thoguh ratio.

I dont think paying sites are really in the gammers future. I predict that we will see a return to musch smaller community based "love of the labor" sites. Which i see as a good thing becase i want to be kept informed but i dont want to wade thoguh piles and piles of stuff about games i would never play to do it on large sites like IGN. I also think that it would be easier to target those site for adds.

BTW am i the only one that visits this site that doesnt have his own gamming site? Should i?

"If we ever do shirts, and we might mainly because we like our eyeball logo, it would be with the idea of getting some walking billboards rather than a revenue stream."

If you do, you can rent my chest for the price of the shirt. It *is* a cool logo. ;)

"If you do, you can rent my chest for the price of the shirt. It *is* a cool logo. ;) "

Heh -- Tom's new brother-in-law came up with it for us. He's an illustrator for I think ad agencies that do things like the grocery store ads we get in newspaper. We're lucky it wasn't a head of lettuce! :)

He really surprised us with the logo. At first when I saw it, I thought, "Good god! What the hell is that?" But it quickly grew on me. It really stands out and is memorable, which I think you want a logo to be. We're really happy with what Tom's brother-in-law came up with. He rules!

I'd guess that we probably will do some shirts in time for E3. We'll keep people posted.

Well, I visit this site and I don't run a website.
I did participate in running a site until we who
ran it lost our inspiration a bit more than half a
year ago.

I think another problem about the whole payment
idea is that, in Europe, credit cards aren't used
and/or trusted as I gather they are in North
America. Of course, that might be a misconception
based on the fact that my circle of relations
aren't diverse enough.

By the way. Bruce, is that site where you put up
your "Magazine Stand" articles still up? I can't
remember what the address was.

Hi Anders. Yes, it's still at http://www.maladjustite.com. It's really just a links page where I link to stuff I've written for other sites, and where I can put things I don't think anyone else will run, like the critique of CGW. I was going to try and run it as a game site with another freelancer but realized I just don't have the time.

The CombatSim move to pay is a case of too little too late. If Doug had introduced a $2/mth fee 12 months ago for - say - access to reviews/features then he might have been successful.

He is now offering us a promise - IF we pay THEN he will be able to pay for more reviews/features and news updates.

One thing for sure - CombatSim will receive much less traffic now so his bandwidth costs should decrease.

Still I wouldn't want to be stuck with a US$50,000 debt if I was only going to break even running a website. You can have all the love in the world running a website but if it impacts on your "real life" then what are you going to do ? Sell the house or pull the plug ?

"The CombatSim move to pay is a case of too little too late. If Doug had introduced a $2/mth fee 12 months ago for - say - access to reviews/features then he might have been successful."

I doubt it. I think they made a mistake in not affliating with a network. There's an EverQuest site that does about 15 million page impressions a month and they're getting about $45,000 a month because they're part of a network. Now, they have plenty of expenses, including some full-time staff working on the site, the hosting costs, some travel expenses as they go to events, and so on, but I suspect they're still making out well. COMBATSIM should have hooked up with someone 12 months ago when the market was a bit stronger. Now I can understand why no network wants them. No network wants to be on the hook for paying for their page impressions.

"He is now offering us a promise - IF we pay THEN he will be able to pay for more reviews/features and news updates."

In other words, he's asking his readers to fund expanding the site. I just don't see this happening.

"One thing for sure - CombatSim will receive much less traffic now so his bandwidth costs should decrease."

It's going to go from a flood to a drippy faucet in volume. I can't imagine that even 10% of the readers will subscribe. Scorpia has tried to run a fee-based RPG site. It never took off.

They should probably allow the forums to remain free and attempt to sell ads for those pages, otherwise I'd expect the forums to really get quiet.

"Still I wouldn't want to be stuck with a US$50,000 debt if I was only going to break even running a website. You can have all the love in the world running a website but if it impacts on your "real life" then what are you going to do ? Sell the house or pull the plug ?"

Yep, it's crazy. If the bulk of the traffic comes from the forums, they could even consider moving them to one of those free messageboard services. Let someone else worry about the hosting costs. They could then keep the forums free and retain a lot of their audience.

I'm having a hard time doing the math that causes http://www.combatsim.com to incur a $50,000 debt.

http://www.combatsim.com/csimfuture.htm

The only figure mentioned is "14 million page views per month." They also say "What it also means is that we have a whoppingly-huge, monstrous, bandwidth bill each and every month. I'm not talking a few hundred dollars here, I'm talking high 4 figures."

High four figures per month. That means approximately.. $8,000 per month?

I e-mailed him asking how many gb/month they were using but I got no response. Page views, if you don't know, is kind of a vague term, to put it MILDLY. They could be 1k pages with no graphics, or they could be 100k bluesnews monster pages. And does page views count graphics? We don't know. And they aren't telling.

I e-mailed the combatsim guy a few days ago, asking him how much bandwidth they were using every month, but got no response.

Still, the numbers don't add up.

http://www.dialtoneinternet.com/prodandserv/colocatedhost/colocated.html

For example. This site, above, offers colocated servers (eg build your own box, ship it to them, they install it on their network). Bandwidth costs $3 per gigabyte used per month.

At that rate (which is probably about average; you could arguably do better), a site would have to transfer 2,666gb in a single month to incur an $8,000 debt.

2,666gb per month is 88gb per day. 88gb per day is 3.6gb per hour. 3.6gb per hour equates to 61.4mb PER SECOND (!!).

Some common internet connection speeds: OC3 = 15.5mb/sec, DS3 = 4.0mb/sec, T1 = 150kb/sec.

So they're saturating four OC3 connections? Help me out here guys. That seems.. ridiculous. Warez and Porn sites probably don't use that much bandwidth!

I forwarded this message to the guys at combatsim. Either they're getting ripped off for bandwidth beyond belief... or well, I have no friggin' clue, frankly.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Whoops. Math error #1. That's 61.4mb per minute not per second. DOH!

2,666gb per month is 88gb per day. 88gb per day is 3.6gb per hour. 3.6gb per hour is 61.4mb per minute; and that means they are right at 1mb/sec.

DS3 = 4.0mb/sec, T1 = 150kb/sec.

So they're saturating approximately seven T1 lines (7 * 150kb = 1050kb/sec). Still, that seems more in line with a porn or warez site than a site dedicated to hard-core wargaming sims! Hard to believe.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Well, I think they pay their writers, so that has to be figured in. They may also take a salary themeselves and count that towards the debt.

Finally, they just might have a lousy deal with a service provider. I've heard some horror stories.

"If we ever do shirts, and we might mainly because we like our eyeball logo, "

Sign me up for a Shoot Club shirt, please :)

If anyone is interested, I got a somewhat surly response from combatsim.com on this issue.

http://www.gamebasement.com/pages/home.asp?nav=discussion&discid=23&topicid=389

You can read the response there along with the original news piece, which is almost identical to the posting I made here.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

I am starting to think that Doug has simply made a lot of bad business decisions. He also mentions that he pays all his writers. Maybe writers won't deal with CombatSim unless they are paid.

The "other" popular website (ah heck SimHQ) don't pay their writers - the writers WANT to write for SimHQ. And SimHQ's writers are all high calibre people - many with real combat/military experience.

I think we are looking at a fundamental difference of cultures here. I have never been entirely happy with the way CombatSim goes about their business. Any time a new forum was suggested on CombatSim Doug always wanted someone to *pay* for it. This at a time when the hardcore flight sim market was going down the toilet.

Doug's handling of the EECH Forum fiasco was attrocious. One day we had a forum and the next day we didn't and then we had it again. I for one got fed up with this crap and that was one of the main reasons I switched to SimHQ.

Razorworks (EECH) noted that it was almost impossible to deal with Doug at CombatSim as you could never pin Doug down to a fixed forum sponsor rate. I believe Neal Stevens at SUBSIM had exactly the same problem when he enquired about banner rates with Doug. As noted in the newsgroup Neal stated he gave up on CombatSim in disgust.

I think Doug's method of charging was to whip out his bank statement on any given day and work out how much he could hit someone for advertising dollars. That sort of nonsense was very unprofessional especially for someone purporting to run a "professional" website.

Personally I think it is a case of what goes around comes around. Sites like SimHQ and their management are very accessible to their members whereas Doug has always tried to run CombatSim like some high and mighty coorporate entity. I am sure CombatSim will be still around in future but their reputation has been tarnished.

Here are Neal Stevens thoughts on this subject :
http://www.subsim.com/ssr/editnew.html

"It makes me worry about my favorite sites. If sites are pulling in good numbers (and a subsequent big bandwidth bill) but the bottom has fallen out of the banner market, then how do they support themselves? Sounds like Q23 has worked it out via CNET hosting, but the Combatsim guy makes it sound like those deals are fading away. We have seen the loss of a few of those hosting networks, so it is possible more could fail. Hopefully not, as I think that will leave us with Walmart.com & that's it."

Damn me for saying that, because I just read the following on HardOCP:

"A big ass axe is what is flying around the CNet affiliate network. We were just told that all the sites on this page that run CNet banners are being cut loose at the end of January. What does this mean to you? I really don't know yet, but rest assured, nobody is immune to their banner network shafting them and walking off."

If this is true, hopefully you guys can find another host ASAP.

Well, I can't really say too much about it, but it's true. We just found out yesterday. Tom was still on vacation -- Happy New Years Tom! Heh.

Hey, the Big Guy doesn't slam a door without opening a window, as the saying goes, but I feel like we're on the tenth floor and the drop is rather steep. :)

We're actually in better shape than a lot of the CNET Affliate sites because we're just getting started. Some of them serve up an enormous number of page views, and finding someone who's willing to take that on with a guaranteed rate is going to be difficult for them.

We may try to sell our own ads. We may try to find a new network (but they're all in trouble as far as I can tell), or we may move up to the Arctic and start clubbing baby seals as a kind of anger therapy. Hard to say. :)

Anyway, we'll continue on. We both really enjoy working on the site, so we're going to work hard to make it viable.