On Oct 20, 7:25*am, Greg Arnold wrote:
On 10/20/2010 6:06 AM, Bruce Hoult wrote:

On Oct 20, 6:37 pm, *wrote:
If you go to the OLC web site, on the right pane you will see
who pays the bills (and funds their retirements) over at OLC.
The sponsors. They are all there, Gold Sponsors, Silver Sponsors
etc. Each can be thousands of $$ a month. Your donations are
peanuts.

There are really a lot of them! I don't immediately see what donation
is required to get to each level of sponsorship.

If the actual web hosting of OLC costs more than a few hundred a month
then they are being ripped off. Is everyone under "About Us" being
paid a salary?

Is the OLC following the Google model, where you provide a service for
free, then use that service as an advertising medium? *If so, the
"sponsors" actually are advertisers, and they presumably think that
their advertising dollars are being well spent.

Are you sure that the advertisers are spending thousands of dollars a
month? *Maybe each is spendng a few thousand per year?


The OLC clearly follows the model of a web service based on taking
user generated content (*our* flights), providing a (free) useful
service
to the users by processing our data, implementing "game mechanics"
to keep us coming back and engaged. Once critical mass is achieved
sponsors want to be featured. This part is not free. More about this
on
another post.

I have no factual knowledge how much are the sponsorships in the
case of OLC (notice I said "can be" not "are). But I do have factual
knowledge about other similar web services using the same model
and I have been really surprised about how much the sponsors pay.

Enough for the principals to not want to attract too much
attention to it (and competition), and just keep the $ flowing.

Clearly, there is no other web service in the soaring space that
attracts
this number of users or have that level of user generated content.

So, yes, for OLC it could be thousands a year, not thousands a month.

Regards,

David