GOODBYE TO THEMESTREAM
You all know the joke about the man who had mixed emotions, when his mother-in-law went over the cliff in his new Porsche. Well, I have some rather mixed emotions about the death of Themestream.
For those of you who were lucky enough never have encountered it, Themestream was sort of the poor-man’s Jerry Springer Show. It provided web space for every idiot, nutcase and refugee from the trailer park that managed to wash ashore and was unable to even work the Pagebuilder on Geocities. And it was designed to pay the writers as well, 2 cents for every page-view. Well, right there you can see where the problem was going to come in. That system meant that there had to be a cashflow TO Themestream to support this and the economics of the internet is such that unless you have a product to sell, you are not going to get the money. (What hurt the dot.coms was that they were like the three stockbrokers on the desert island who thought they were getting rich by passing their hats back and forth.) As more and more companies realize that banners on web pages do not bring in a lot of customers it puts a strain on the outfits that have depended on banner location sales to pay for their systems. So Themestream found itself with the prospect of payouts that it could not afford, maintaining the equipment and line access for the servers and avoiding being named in libel suits. The expenses just got to be too much.
I won’t miss it very much. Reading it proved to be a bore. And it’s failure pointed out the perils of depending on the generosity of bean counters. I have no illusions about the possibility that Yahoo, with it’s own financial problems, might decide to kill off Geocities someday and so I look on this site more as a sort of practice thing to hone my design skills for the time when I have to buy space from another server. But at the same time, Themestream’s death more or less silences one particular idiot that I was counting on to give me lots of free PR for my newest projects.
Oh, well, back to the drawing board.