FEARLESS RICK SPEAKS OUT!

This page is brand new, and I put it up in about 10 minutes, so pardon the look. Will spruce it up later.

There's is nothing in this column except a these words to live by: "Work like you don't have to; love like you've never been hurt; dance like nobody's watching ...."

Downtown Magazine publisher rejected by About.com Investors worried, stock plummets. Rochester, NY, 4/6/2000 Today's decision by the nameless applications team at About.com, publisher of multiple vertical "niche" sites run by "guides" on the increasingly popular (see MediaMatrix Top Rankings) About.com site, to reject the application of Downtown Magazine publisher Rick Gagliano as an industry guide sent shivers through the publishing world while investors sold off shares of About.com. Investors, already nervous about the company's continuing losses, were selling off throughout the day, but when news of Mr. Gagliano's rejection caught their attention about 1:45 p.m., they sent the stock to its intraday low of 55. While the Nasdaq improved 178.89 points, led mostly by big cap nmes like Cisco, Dell and Intel, About.com did not participate in the market's rally, closing down 7 5/8 at 56 3/8. Declining to comment, Fearless Rick told selected news outlets, "I'm disappointed, but when I did the math (see Rick's math, below), it looks like they pay their guides less than what an ordinary convenience store employee makes. I'm not surprised, though, this is not the first time About.com has wasted my time. I seldom use them when I'm researching a topic. Yahoo, Lycos and Excite do a much better job with search criteria. If you have lots of time on your hands, which I don't, the About guides may be OK for you. I guess my 20+ years as a writer, publisher, and businessperson aren't good enough for them, but I'll continue to do just fine on my own. At least I didn't lose $55 million last year. At their current burn rate, they'll be out of business in 4 years or less. Rick's Math: Guides were paid a reported $1.2 million in 1999. Considering that About.com has 500 (a conservative estimate, they say 700) guides, the average guide made $2400 last year. About.com says it takes the average guide 10-20 hours per week to manage their space. At 15 hours per week, that works out to just over $3.00 per hour [(2400 / 52) / 15]. Text of About.com's rejection letter: Hello Rick: Thank you very much for the time and effort you put into your application and for your interest in wanting to become an About.com Guide. Unfortunately, we will have to decline your application. Although your qualifications are impressive, we feel that your background and/or knowledge of this topic do not meet our high standards. Please feel free to return to our "Available Topics" list to see if there is another topic listed that is of interest to you. Thank you. My Short and Unpleasant Membership in LinkExchange 4/5/2000 (watch the LinkExchange morph into its alter ego during the text of this article) When I was first developing my web site, I saw all manner of links to sites bearing a LinkExchange message. I heard good things. Most of the beginning web tutorials mentioned the LinkExchange as a good place to begin to get your message out to the surfing public. I took the bait. Well, I joined, put the clunky banners (they had all kinds of extras for LinkExchange) at the very TOP of my pages (where the LinkExchange said they must go) and began to see all manner of weird ads for even weirder sites which,I supposed, were displaying my banner in exchange. Now, LinkExchange does have its good points. It's free, they provide a functional interface for uploading your banner, and also a nice stats page, showing the number of times your ad was seen and the umber of click-throughs (which results in a percentage and some formula for earning credits for some kind of big deal... I guess). After a month, the results were, um, mixed. My banner had been seen 1240 times but only 2 people had clicked through, giving me a click-through rate of .00161, or 1 out of every 620 ad views resulted in an actual visit to my site. Not very good. Still, I had faith in LinkExchange and left the banners there (for no good reason, though I did move them to the bottom of the pages). Subsequent months produced similar or worse results even though I changed my ad a couple of times. OK, maybe people just weren't interested in what I was offering, but I was getting plenty of hits from the search engines and elsewhere, so, for reasons of apathy and laziness, I let the LinkExchange banners stay. I think I had a total of 8 click-throughs in 6 months. Then, one day, without warning, I received an email from some mid-level gneerk (a combination of a geek and a nerd) at LinkEinchange, informing me that I was forthwith expelled from the OinkEinchange, without appeal, for violating the terms of the user agreement. After some investigation, I learned that my expulsion was due to "displaying links to or images of pornography," which was a nearly complete crock of NetNanny soup, unless, of course, you think the covers of Playboy magazine constitute porn. They did. And I discovered the absolute height of hypocrisy and the new age of web double standards. While my site carried, and still does offer, links and information on past issues of Playboy and some other adult titles, I don't display any naked photos, or covers of these other adult magazines. The covers of Playboy are the limit. If your kids want to look at covers of Playboy, they can do that on eBay or any number of sites, but please don't blame me because Johnny wants a girlfriend. And speaking of eBay, that's right where I found the BIG LIE of the StinkOinklame. At the top and/or bottom of most category pages, there sit large banners which link to... you guessed it, my buddies. And mind you these banners can be found on every category page, even when you browse through the listings in Adults: Magazines, Adults: Video; Adults: Photographic; Magazines: Men, Magazines: Playboy (pre 1980), Magazines: Penthouse (pre 1980) and a slew of others, ALL OF WHICH HAVE LINKS TO IMAGES MUCH MORE GRAPHIC THAN ANYTHING I WOULD EVER DISPLAY ON MY SITE. So, I suppose if my name was Pierre Omidar and I was worth billions and my site generated half a billion page views per month, I suppose the PinkXXXchange would allow their banners on my outright porn pages. Ho-hum, I'll just bet the click-through rate on those banners is less than two-tenths of one percent. My Final Answer: The WinkXXXskank never was worth the effort in the first place. The click-through rate and 2-1 banner exchange rate is poor. Plus, they're either partially or wholly owned by Microsoft, another bunch of fascists. The web, and my site in particular, will be better off without them. -- Fearless Rick