im looking at different sites toassignto acq
ppl for ad sales.. which ones would u prefer
(genre)

Sports and Gaming come to mind. I'd say Mens
General, Fashion and similar as well except I
don't know if we have any.

do you have any special sites that you'd like
to pick you know you can do great on

i think jon wants rpgamer and squaregamer :)

Heh. Actually if I can keep out of gaming
I'll be happy, but I suspect I can still
leverage old contacts so I'm not looking to
avoid it. Let me look around the different
channels this afternoon and I'll see if I can
eyeball a few sites that have decent size and
substance that I think I can work well.

ok great

any luck on the sites?

Kevin Jenkins at MPOG isn't lazy. He's put
every campaign up on time or faster and has
never once complained openly or not. Yet he's
extremely frustrated and angry right now.

well not every one.. but a majority refuse to
coopreate

so what is he frustrated about

We should directly and harshly penalize those
that don't. I don't think we need to reward
the ones that do - but I think they should be
treated well.

i dont think we treat them badly?

The communication that's come down in the past
week. How it's been handled. Nothing is
concise or to the point. I can forward his
email if you like.

Many of them do feel mistreated right now. A
lot feel like they're being openly threatened
right now.

I'm not on "their side" here. Just telling
you what we're running into down in the
trenches on this.

sure..feedback is always good so we can let
our WRC's have better diplomatic communication
skills.

Sent. That email is mild and diplomatic
compared to what we're getting today. The
main problems seem to be that they want
directives to be straight and to the point.
Not one of them has argued with me the merits
of putting the campaign up - it's all been
about the delivery.

thats funny

well, sure.. but 90% of the webmasters arent
cooperating with direct and to the point
directives

so i think g3 took this approach to create
rapport with the webmasters

and build realtions

you cant please everyone.. i think he's trying
to build a relationship and communication and
rapport..

perhaps one solution is to divided the
webmasters into 3 groups

It seems to be doing the opposite. I just had
an hour long call with a webmaster who spent
the time venting about his approach.

You're right though, you can't make everyone
happy.

1. who like direct and to the point
communication.

2. who like to be "babied" w/ video, etc.

3. who need to be threatened

Heh.

i think he should make a list and treat them
accordingly :) ill talk to him bout that

which webmaster was venting :)

I'm sure you all have gone around and around
over this. I guess my approach would have to
be short and sweet, then those that don't
cooperate get the campaigns inserted by us and
we fine them some good % for it.

personally, i wouldnt do the video stuff.. i
think his stuff is hilarious.. but its getting
their attention :)

yeah..thats the other approach we need to take
also.. we talked about this yesetrday

have an in-house team do it w/ those who dont
cooperate ..and delay their payment

until they do cooperate

I don't think there's any downside there
except the energy we have to espend to cover
the slackers. But noone can fault us for
doing so and fining the ones that don't
comply. They all know what the climate is out
there, and what we have to do to monetize.

eXpend rather.

i read kevin's email..he does have a point..
mass emails are bad.. i hate doing mass emails
myself

These campaigns are how they get paid. They
don't do their job and help roll out the
campaign, they don't get paid, or at least
don't get paid 100%.

Anyway, all just food for thought. We'll
figure out what's the best way to do this.
I'm in my 14th hour - so calling it a day.
Couple RFPs out btw, nothing that will have us
swimming in cash - but I'll let you know what
kind of responses we get back. Every little
bit helps.

Oh and Reviewboard has agreed to close. I
know you liked what you saw of them.

BTW - last thought. One thing brought up by
another webmaster today was the notion of a
webmaster congress of sorts where they have a
unified body (and thus a representative) to
relay concerns, their voice, etc. How would
you feel about that?

union! eww

Heh.

i just fwd: that email to g3 and cc'd you guys

Can see lots of pitfalls, might also be a way
the webmasters police themselves and deal with
slackers. Don't know.

yeah, we always wanted an in-house webmasters
advocate.. that was david woodruff at one
point.. its not a bad idea

It's easy in the Marines, the platoon takes
care of the problem child and everything goes
smoothly. =)

heh.. maybe we need to setup a platoon and
brigade per category or area?

we're alrready starting that.. asia
webmasters, europe, usa gaming, usa general

maybe better to get one of their own to be the
'rep'

for 5 to 10 sites at a time.. i dunno

but lets start by getting g3 going in the
right direction first

Maybe a little bit of both, I don't know.
It's a concept though. And might help them
feel empowered.

TOTALLY agree there. =)

I'm out. Have a good weekend. Will be around
if anything comes up.

ok cya

Amazing news on CNet lady btw.

yeah thats great.. she needs all the info u
guys were asking for though, and more..
demographic surveys, target audience, etc.

of course, proof still has to be in the
pudding.. im not too excitd until we see money
flowing in the bank :)

No, I'm the same way. But that's definitely
encouraging. Let me talk to Jon about the ad
bullets. Maybe there's a way to streamline
that. I've been spending time recently
looking at media kits of our competitors, so
at least we have an idea of what is needed at
the base level.

yeah.. we just need to concentrate on the
online media kits too.. she doesnt even use
offline media kits. something nice online
would be awesome.. of course, having our
webguide and better navigation (dynamic) links
on the inside efront part to let
advertisers/ppl navigate efront would help
tremendously.. we need more programming
resources for that though..we're backed up:(

Actually all the ones I've been eyeballing
have been online. I think that's more or less
the standard these days.

ive been talking to the maxpc sales guys.. and
know their entire cycle, figures, etc. pretty
much..
for the number of sales ppl we have (4)..we're
not doing that bad in total revenues per
head.. we need to increase that to 10-15 sales
ppl though
aug: 160k, sept: 320k, oct: 260k, nov: 1.7mil
aug: 3 ppl, sept: 4 ppl, oct: 4 ppl, nov: 4
ppl

we also have chris -- who is setting up local
salespartnerships ($0 yet)
and brad - who moved from dennis's biz dev
group to sales recently..who isnt counted in
the above

brad has a $35 cpm deal for 2 mil imps in the
gaming channel for 70k..that was pitched in
person today and they were enthusiastic.. he's
saying he'll get it signed monday.. we'll see

Heh, well sure - now I feel like a punk with
my little $15k RFPs here and there. j/k

everything helps.. heck, if after rampup you
can pull in 50k/month consistenly.. thats
great:)

sometimes ppl forget to pay the bills..they
try to go for homeruns.. ilike lot of smaller
deals coming in too .. someone's gotta pay the
light bill

No, I agree - was just joking. I want to
develop a relationship with EA, we do that
even at a low level and it can turn into
something that rolls at a higher.

oh is this for EA? great.. i know mike murphy
tried to do something w/ them for skinz and
stuff in october but that didnt go through

Yeah. Still have some good entrenched
contacts over there. We're going to try and
start with a campaign for a Wes Craven (or was
it Clive Barker) game called "Undying" and
possibly "American McGee's Alice". If we get
those and it goes well, they're interested in
rolling campaigns across their different
departments, and are acutely interested in our
capacity to serve their commericals via
streaming FMV ads down the road.

hey.. Rad is availalbe this weekend to work on
the online media kit.. should we brainstorm
and give him a spec and layout/etc?

that would be awesome to get that done this
weekend..because we have maxpc guys strting
next week .. i can get him into the loop as
well

Yeah. I have a couple quick links I can shoot
somewhere as at least a reference.

Obviously the sooner we get that up the easier
life is on a lot of fronts. Certainly
especially Ms.CNet, but also on the grassroots
pursuits as well.

re: SomethingAwful.com

Lowtax (ICQ#19629905) Wrote:
My site's down *again*

yeah matt is at globalcenter moving servers
around i think

hey Will.. what were the terms of the RB deal

Are you there? Need to talk

Hey, just walked back in. What's up?

I can shoot you the last version of the RB
contract if you like?

Basic concept is $14k and a normal amount of
stock. No wacky clauses except he was still
going to get his stock (based upon the
existing vesting schedule) if we terminated
him.

Where we are with RB right now is his mom (a
lawyer) wants to add some meat to the
contract. Just simply specify some things
that are implied and meant, just not spelled
out. I warned Phil (the owner) about it all
falling apart if new terms were introduced -
so he's actually working on our behalf to a
certain degree to reel his mom in.

hey Will are you there

Sure am.

Been talking to Roy. I'm sure he's filled you
in on the direction we need to head down for
the near term. The ad market's much tighter..
not much low hanging fruits out there and we
really have to work for our keep now :) Which
means more resources towards the area and
scaling back on untargeted RON acqs for
pageview growth somewhat until we can fully
monetize our assets.

Yeah, we've been talking about that.
Completely agree there.

Any acqs right now should probably be
something like breastfeeding.com and not
anycrapgames.com, etc. I'm actually pretty
excited to hear we can support regional ad
sales. Going to see if I can work Jax and
Columbus.

yup.. we have chris higgins doing local sales
too ([email protected])

Or perhaps OH/FL - we'll see how that plays
out.

Great, I'll touch base with him Monday.

That means we have to get more exp. sales ppl
(we're starting to do that here) and cut back
on other resources. I bounced this off of roy
already and want to bounce this off of you.
Basically, streamlining our ops in the office.
We let jason go few weeks ago; basically he
was unprodcutive. Brad pulled in a 60k sale
(30 cpm).. so he's starting to kick up.

On your side, I wanted to talk about sharon;
it might be in her and our best interest to
part because of our immediate needs. I know
she tried very hard and was dedicated on the
acq. side. I'd like to get your thoughts on
this proposal:
* Let her know about our direction
* Pay her through the end of the year.
* Vest her 5000 options immediately (and waive
the excercise clause of 30 days to 1 year or
something).

I think that's both reasonable and fair.
Certainly it addresses our needs, and between
us I see that as an approprite opportunity to
streamline.

Trying to allocate more funds on the sales
side and with you doing Sales and Roy helping
out more on the traffic side, we also have
Lloyd coming on board for tech sales and
Monique as well (cnet)

Since you're her immediate supervisor there,
would you like to talk to her or do you feel
it would be better for me to do so?

I think I would rather if that's okay with
you.

That's fine; that's why I approached you
first. It's a touchy subject obviously and I
want to make sure we do it right.

Absolutely, agree 100%. I think handled the
right way she can see it as a positive. I
know what drives Sharon, and she may well come
out of this without any negative feelings.

It's never a real positive - but variables
allow it to be as non-negative as possible.
=)

Right, and we'll do whatever we need on our
side. including the option stuff -- she
deserves it.

I'll talk to her this weekend.

Is it safe to assume we (Jon, myself, Brian)
should continue to pursue clear revenue
opoprtunity acquisitions?

okay thanks. let me know and i'll let mike
frue get the paperwork in writing (with the
options, etc.) so she's secure.

yes

OK, I'll make that secondary to ads right now.
Have a few leads, going to put some of the
quality ROI types in a holding pattern.

our big push is revenues now.. i'd like to
spit out 20% of our revenues and put it in the
bank as a cushion

That may or may not include RB, when I get
their contract I'll talk to you and/or Jerry
about it.

who knows how long this market will last

okay. I think RB can get us alot of
storerunner (ecomm) revenues, no?

with every review essentially.. al ink..

It can't last like this forever. I'm no
analyst but I don't see how it can't start to
strengthem in the new year.

Absolutely it will.

do you know how many daily visitors he gets?

thats a very good indication of conversino on
the srunner links

uniques? Not off the top of my head, but I'll
find out. He's an odd one. 22MM PVs 1/00,
650k when I started talking to him. 3.5-4MM
now, with a clause in the contract that he has
to hit 7MM within 90 days. At his current
growth rate, he should more be around 10MM
w/in 90.

wow.. from 22mm to 3 mil huh.. what happened

Botched acqs process that lasted 5 months with
a company overseas. They just wanted his
backend.

The upside there for us is that he's growing
at an unprecedented rate, so we effectively
get a 20MM site (if/when it returns to that)
on a 7MM contract structure.

ok..
let's say we get $1 cpm.. that 7k
and if we can get 7k on storerunner.. which is
70,000 clicks a month.. which is 2000 a day

do you think he can generate that? if so, or
if we could get him to somehow do it

then we can sign :)

because storerunner for us is very short
payment terms.. helps with cashflow alot

He is very easy to work with, which is a
quality I look for in acqs targets these days
to be honest. I don't know what a common CTR
is on Storerunner, but I don't think there's
any question his would be amongst the higher
CTRs.

i know!! no more kids

i think we all learned alot

Hell, we may be able to get him on board with
SR even if he doesn't sign. Don't know how
that might work, maybe some sort of payment to
him... Just a "what if" contingency.

good idea.. maybe even try to get it to him
now.. 'test of his traffic' as an excuse or
something

Yeah, even some of the non-kids are pretty
confusing. I try to keep them docile (the
ones that vent towards me), but in a few
particular cases it's increasingly difficult
to understand that level of rage coming from
someone who works about an hour a day for an
above average (according to US gross
standards) salary.

I'll talk to him on Monday. He's actually
anxious to get aboard with us, it's his
partners (damn Carter administration lawyer)
and his mother that are slowing us down.

yeah i know.. well, guess what? im going
through the webmaster sites, payments, etc.
right now.. starting with the ones who arent
cooperating, im kicking them out..

So SR now as opposed to later may well be
feasible with him.

that sounds good

to start off the relationship.. so we can
gauge the return too

I can't say anything but 'good' to that. I
look forward to hearing from some of them how
much worse the grass is on the other side of
the fence.

if you have any leads on ones who arent
cooperating or wahtever, let me know
(webmasters/sites)

Particularly with the impending demise of the
GameSPYs and UGOs.

yeah

Will do. The danger I guess here is confusing
"angry and vocal" with "uncooperative". Some
are both, but a few are just one or the other.
I'll sit down with Jo and Sharon this weekend
and compare notes on the reactions we had to
the SR rollout.

yeah..true.. of course, we wont do anything
to shoot ourselves in the foot.. evaluating
them on a one by one basis

like themeheaven has a 24x7 banner next to
ours.. well u know his payment will be delayed

It goes without saying I think that anyone who
still doesn't have the channelguide up by the
1st is clearly uncooperative. =)

Heh, yeah - that can't fly. Especially as we
ramp up sales.

well we're changing our coutning using the
webguide now.. so it shoots them :)

we'll be reasonable but firm :)

Yeah, I heard. Came across more than a few
frantically getting it up on every page.

Noone can fault 'reasonable but firm'.

heh

Anyway - I better get running here. Meds are
running out so starting to feel like hell.
Good chatting with you. I'll follow up with
you and Mike after I talk to Sharon.

still sick? geez:) ok..thanks..cya

Yeah, it's not getting much better. Constant
tests, and a 'spot' in one lung. Probably
nothing, but man - I better be getting
normal/well again soon. Just about sick of
being cooped up in the house 24/7. Then
again, it does allow for a whole new level of
focus on the work at hand. =)

Later.

probably too late to change the terms on RB
huh?

May not be. Want to do it by a different
scale? Revs?

just wondering.. maybe daily visitors

hey how's it going

iBLAMEj00 (ICQ#8906076) Wrote:
But you pay webmasters by page views instead
of unique visitors; it would be best if you
did by unique visitors.

[even tim agrees we should pay webmasters per
unique users, not pageviews. our sites get
low ctr% and are too sticky -- bad for
advertising (in general)]

hey Will .. are you there

Am now - what's up?

Hey .. just wanted to tell you that we'll be
delaying our payroll as I mentioned before
this week unfortunately :

np - how long?

i would say 7 to 10 days at most.. About.com
owes us 200k but it looks like they're going
to play games with us.. speedyclick should be
giving us 200k next week as well..

Cool - we can make things stretch that long
I'm sure.

Hey, Moviehit.com just called me. We haven't
moved them over yet (closed 3-4 weeks ago) and
they lose their hosting tomorrow. The ball
was rolling with Nate to move them, but he's
on vacation now. So they're looking for us to
pay their hosting bill so they don't go dead
tomorrow.

(They're (moviehit) telling me Nate is on
vacation) - don't know if that's true or not.

What should I tell them?

Obviously we're not excited about dropping
$1540 on hosting for them if we're delaying
payroll.

nate is in Dc yeah

why are they dropping their hosting

can we tell them that it will be delayed until
we have more serveres

and we don't have our banners on their site
yet do we

They've been taking a loss every month, are
basically out of money.

oh really.. and we're still paying them 2cpm +
free hosting?

Yeah, but the scale is much lower than 2cpm.

They're a flopped startup with a lot of
promise basically. They burnt through their
cash. The loss they''ve been taking was due
to their startup costs, not standard operating
costs.

maybe we can use this oppty to renegotiate a
better deal? or nah? :)

how do u mean scale is much lower

Scale is like a 1cpm or less I think.

really?

thats ncie.. i thought it was 2

I thought so, lemme check.

1500.00 for every 1750k PVs mo. So less than
1cpm scales.

Anyway, they're still on the phone with me.
They're saying Nate gave them a timeline and
that's why they cancelled their hosting.

hm.. can they keep it alive for another 30
days

we're in the midst of a move from CAIS to
another provider

I think we're covered. THey're going to see
about some sort of temporary solution with
their old provider.

sounds good :)

Hey, have had a couple webmasters ask about
the availability of the horizontal navbar.
Any word on when that's going to be ready?

yeah.. waiting on nate.. but that will only be
available in areas where they cant absolutely
use the vertical

Penny-Arcade is wondering if they can put the
vert navbar on the left too, below their nav
buttons on the new design. It's below the
fold, but right in the meat of their content.
Thoughts? It would be above the fold on the
strip pages which is both the bulk of their
traffic and their largedst exit pages.

hey Will.. how are the ad sales efforts going
thus far?

Haven't made just tons of headway. I've
received a bunch of materials from Chris and
have followed up with the existing RFP that I
have out - but haven't really started pursuing
much beyond some gaming contact leads I have
yet. 'More' being local sales and the like.
I haven't made a clean break from acqs at all,
in fact there are some big sites I'm trying to
reorganize to fit our newer needs and see if
we can get them in with the new structure.

It's a juggling act and I just have more acqs
balls up at the moment than sales, but I think
I'm on the cusp of being able to divert more
time towards the sales. Managed to track down
point of contacts for some of the more
significant 'localized' companies I think
might be interested in regional sales - so
hoping to start cold calling them this
weekend.

sure.. we're getting burned bigtime on
page-view counting.. we need to do
acquisitinos by daily visitor counting..
pageview is an artificial indication of
traffic. also, just fyi, i did all the
original acquisitions (30).. and all those
are/were 1year deal.. they're due up now.. and
its saved us 90%.. the 3 year was an idea
whose time has come to pass..its an eternity..
i'd like to also go back to doing one year
deals (vest their shares and case over one
yera)

Sounds good on the one year, I don't see that
being an issue with people at all. In terms
of daily visitor counting, I haven't run into
anyone yet that has really balked at that -
and to be honest, it might help the acqs
process. Webmasters are used to talking PVs
and CPMs - start talking visitors with them
and we've taken them out of their comfort zone
in terms of what they think they should
expect.

i know :)

and in this market, 1 year and that would be
alot more efficient.. now to just get our revs
going

btw, do u know marc? matt said he was looking
for another job or something

if u know him, can u talk to him see whats
going on. we'd like to keep him

Marc Frank? Yeah, know him well.

Will do. We talk just about every day.

i know 3 ppl in the office needed rent $ and
we cut them checks for it

and nate asked about marc needing $ for check
or something, i said not a problem of course

and yesterday matt said he was looking for
another job cuz he was getting evicted or
something..yikes

btw, our money is being wired today so we
should be set

Hmm, yeah - I'll definitely talk to him today.

thanks!

No problem - would hate to see Marc leave!

im sure we'll be able to have him stay

i thought nate was going to talk to victoria
to get a check over to him.. guess that didnt
happen

I am too to be honest. He would have let me
know if he was serious about leaving.

ok :) everything else is starting to look
good. working on a big deal w/ excite right
now.. getting our european arm going so they
can take over that inventory.. im still
distressed over our ad sales effort.. geting
worse.. i moved 2 ppl around to our biz dev
and have a new vp of biz dev (worklife
founder).. and they're pitching our b2b
solutions to portals now

New sales guru (cnet lady) working out well?

she doesnt start till the 15th.. im concerned
about her though.. she was distressed that we
didnt take credit cards.. and she didnt want
to have a 100k/month quota.. 60k/month was
what she wanted to start out w/

sales ppl bs

so we'll see how it goes

Yeah - they do seem to share a common trait
with that.

i mean who takes credit card payments for ad
sales

she said most of her clients

like.. are they small clients? she said her
clients put it on their biz card

weird..

No kidding, I've never heard of that. With
the one exception of google.com who has a link
"instant advertising with a credit card".

Which is sort of cool, but I wonder if anyone
has ever used it?

ya..not sure.. http://206.161.202.42/

new automotive hub.. if excite buys off on it,
then we might need to buy auto sites to
backfill the inventory

your check amount is 'net' ..meaning taxes
have already been taken out

Yeah, we saw that. It's just a different
amount than what normally gets deposited each
pay period. We were just confused.

really? how much is it off by

May be a moot point, our bank isn't going to
let us deposit the check in my account.

Mine is off $218.43, Jo's is off $53.54.

i told victoria to wire it to every1 friday
but she said the wiring deadline was 2 (it was
3).. any other way we can get the money out to
u fast?

can you sign on the back as DBA Will Bryant

or "for deposit only payable to will bryant
and sign underneath"

I don't think so. It's not the end of the
world though. We're scrambling right now to
see if we can get a GMX account open down here
so that we can just xfer the money into our
personal accounts.

i used to do that all the time

Yeah, we tried all that. Damn banks won't let
any of that slide.

:( i wonder how victoria made that mistake

Actually, we might be cool. Jo's heading out
to try and open a biz account now.

i coudl wesetern union the funds or
something.. monday is bank holiday so no wires
allowed then either

She's had a lot riding on her - I don't have
any hard feelings towards anyone. It happens.
=)

yeah.. we were short.. all the $ didnt come
in.. so i had an idea.. to net it out.. and
then we'd pay the taxes next week.. and i told
her to do that.. she went through adp and
figured out everyone's nets

re: Western Union - whatever you think is
best. I wouldn't care at all about waiting
until next week, but we're going to get hit
with some serious penalties with the mortgage
company.

Heh, that's a good idea. =)

i know :) she was like huh.. what u cant do
that

i said yes you dcan :)

how much penalty?

If the bank lets us open this biz account
we're golden.

Can get the mortgage in and everything.

ok.. hopefully they should.. do u have
gamesmatrix documentation

Yeah. Just had to type up a few quick "board
resolutions" lol.

Have everything else.

heh been there done that :p

was roy's check send to u?

Anyway, thanks for asking about it. Hopefully
the 'crisis' has been diverted. If the bank
gives us a problem I'll let you know to see if
we can find another solution.

Yeah it was - I'm priority mailing it to him
now.

sure no problem

thanks for sticking it out.. kinda rough week
:)

We're all in this for the long haul and for
the company. eFront is preferable to
something a little more secure but not as
exciting. Will make it that much better when
we come out the other side. =)

yeah i know :) ill fwd you a good news email..
hopefully something comes out of it

Great!

Hey, did Jon send you that gamers.com article
re: UGO and its affiliates?

yeah he did..

Woops. Jo says I have to go with to open this
thing. I'm off. Will talk to you later.

k talk to u later

FYI

Lowtax (ICQ#19629905) Wrote:
Will, I'm probably going to be giving up SA.
I can't wait until February to be paid, and
I'm sick to death of all this network crap and
never knowing if I'll have enough money to pay
rent at the end of the month. I'm broke and I
can't take this any more..

have hiim send an email to g3 outlining his
needs .. g3 is collecting all of those and
we'll be allocating some funds to take care of
the webmasters who are struggling

Will do.

in the recap email g3 is sending out monday,
he's going to remind every1 of their
confidentiality clause

i mean if infospace sees stuff like that, we
wont get any funding

then its a sure death

so we're only hurting ourselves

roy & i were just talking about SA

we wanted to see if we can try a new concept
with him

Sorry back - seems one of the PA guys is
continuiing to shit on us in public - and is
being specific about myself and Jon in the
process. Trying to diffuse that through the
other PA guy, but with no luck.

what do you recommend?

I think we need a cease and desist letter from
the lawyers.

and shut their site down?

I think that needs to go out as soon as
possible. If he continues, I think we need to
take some action.

do you recommend shutting them down

to get their attention?

No, I think we fire a warning shot with the
letter. If that doesn't work I think we come
down hard and furious in every way we can.

If Mike manages to impair our ability to
operate we have legal recourse, but what good
does that do us if we go under because we miss
out on some big deal?

Shutting them down now would just fuel the
fire.

The letter gives him enough rope to either
hang himself, or climb off his soapbox.

do you have a sample cease & desist letter

i'd like to get it fired off today

im looking on my hard drive to see if i have
any

we put specific evidence, etc. and quote laws

and fire a warning shot..

and using his letter he sent us also as
evicence of breach

and violating our confidentialty policies

as well as defamation

Yeah, we have to do something. It needs to be
Mike 'Gabe' Krahulik to, and not Jerry 'Tycho'
Parkinson. Jerry isn't being vocal.

im seeing if i can find a sample copy of a
generic c&d .. then we put specfics in there..
and fax it to him on efront letterhead

and on the bottom we can do

cc: Melody Dapp Williams,
[full title, esquire, etc.]

that way it makes it seem intimidating that
the lawyer is ccd on it

and we can send it to our lawyer as well

but it brings more credibiilty

Yeah.

and we order eerything to be ceased in 24
hours and retract everything they said

and delete their postings

or we will take action

do you guys wnat to prepare it and ill review
it then you can fax to him?

Yeah, have a template?

still searching :)

Is Greg writing a letter as well? Or is that
the one Jerry is having me do the first draft
of?

oh thats probably you.. not sure who was doing
it

ok cool - just wanted to make sure we weren't
overlapping.

These people kill me. They're so short
sighted and immature. I've been trying to
talk sense to Tycho but I'm not sure I'm
gettomg anywhere.

So naive.

I might have talked some sense to Tycho. I'm
going to watch the messageboards closely this
weekend to see if Gabe persists. If he does,
we'll get the C&D out.

http://www.creditmania.com/Letters/cease.htm

one sample :)

looking for more

In the meantime, I've got a lot of issues that
I want to try and work into the letter to try
and diffuse all of this. I don't think pissed
of webmasters is the end of the world, but
better to have them on their backs wagging
their tails than snapping at us.

yes i agree

Yeah, found some samples too. I might also
call in a favor from some people I know at
Paul Hastings under the premise that his
actions are endangering my livelihood by means
of endangering eF. If they'll do it it will
be from eF, not from me so should work fine.
I hope they will, they're some of the best.

Some part of me is still carrying a Corps
mentality. I keep thinking a rifle butt to
some kneecaps would solve all our problems.
Instant collections and quiet webmasters. =)

i like that attitude :)

anyway we can work on SA? imnot sure if
jonathan fwd u my thoughts on that

Not sure either, checking.

let me do it

ok.

My current plan with Lowtax is to get him on
the phone next time he's available and find
out what he needs to get by. Not this $13k
crap - the guy can live on 1/5th of that in
style.

Perhaps if we can assure him that much at the
very least just until things get better then
he'll be happy.

yeah i know.. actually if u want, put him on
our payroll on normal salary

or something

and if things dont work out, he gets his site
back.. so he's assured

and would reduce the 13k

and also

we can get him to do real revenue stuff that
ill fwd to you

Yeah - something. Let me work on him, we have
a decent rapport.

His #1 issue is server stability right now -
how soon are we at S4R?

and tell him to get his forum msg down in the
meanwhile.. and if we cant work anything out,
then he can rant and rave then :)

s4r..i ask matt and nate everday.. they said
they're almost completed

w/ data transfer

let me ask matt again

if we get SA on our side, then PA ranting will
seem like its their fault

if he posts good stuff about efront :)

and they're a community type of site.. so
bellwether sort of

Yeah, that's my biggest issue right now.
Everyone seems to think it's okay to rant
about this issues in open public forums. It's
not. I mean shit, they can certainly have
grievances and that's a normal aspect of life,
but these people (kids) need to understand
that when they started taking money, it
stopped being a hobby and became a business.

yeah i know

That's my hurdle right now with the email -
make points like that while narrowing the gap
between us.

Heh, the good news is that at least at the
moment, we have a lot of people coming to us
interested in being acquired. Since 1/1 I've
received more direct emails with people asking
to come aboard than in 3 months before.

i know..

if half of our webmasters leave, we can get
better contradcts with

1 year terms.. and $ based on uniques

lol, no kidding.

so i dont mind if ppl leave.. but we need to
do it gracefully

like sitepowerup.com i gracefully parted ways

(very bad clickthrus)

and trying to do the same w/ teenstation (too
many banners per user)

Agree totally. Hey look, we can really
survive if we lose some of the 'garbage' sites
that will never be able to run anything but
RON stuff. If we're already overpaying them -
then no harm no foul if they go.

roy7 1/13/2001 12:53 pm:

Argh the SA
forums box seems to be offline.

Anyway
please do pay Lowtax

(somethingawful.com) next week if possible. I
can take a
pay delay if need be. I feel really
bad for him.
He came to us after 2 previous
networks
that went under and didn't give
people
notice and he had late payments from.

tell him to stop
spamming us then

and encouraging
his people to stop spamming us

rather work with
us and we'll work w/him

roy7 1/13/2001 1:04 pm:

(The Ars article)

Brian -
newsletter (ICQ#346505) Wrote:
Yeah,
someone that I was working with and
wanted to
sell to us saw that and changed
there mind

that's okay.. we
probably dont need acqs right
now anyways

roy7 1/13/2001 1:04 pm:

SA makes more
than I realized, $13K/month. I
can't pay
that off my credit card. But
hopefully we
can send him at least half next
week.

roy7 1/13/2001 1:05 pm:

We didn't take
SA's forums down intentionally
did we?

no of course
not..

we should
probably cut SA

we cant keep his
forums up

roy7 1/13/2001 1:07 pm:

From a
positioning point of view, if INSP
funds us, we
should pay webmasters off before
doing a PR.
Don't want them seeing we have a
pile of cash
and asking where their money is.
;)

and he keeps
having server problems with us

roy7 1/13/2001 1:07 pm:

S4R will solve
that.

roy7 1/13/2001 1:08 pm:

I don't like the
idea of cutting someone who
has tried
their best for us but we've let them
down.
Someone like PA who hate us and wanted
out all
along, yeah, they are gone. But Lowtax
had been
pretty pro-eFront and trying to
support us.

how has lowtax
been pro-efront

i was just
thinking in his best interest

roy7 1/13/2001 1:09 pm:

Well he's just
been cooperative in our reveune
stuff so far
as I know, and more patient than
most of us
would have been with the forum
problems.

megagames emailed
that his srever is down hm

roy7 1/13/2001 1:09 pm:

Any tech people
in today? SA's forum box needs
rebooted.

no.. i dont see
any1

roy7 1/13/2001 1:10 pm:

It looks bad with
the thread Ars links to
goign to a
machine that isn't on. ;)

probably better
for us :)

in the recap
email g3 is sending out monday,
he's going
to remind every1 of their

confidentiality clause
i mean if
infospace sees stuff like that, we
wont get any
funding
then its a
sure death
so we're
only hurting ourselves

roy7 1/13/2001 1:20 pm:

I was going to
try paying lowtax with a cash
advance
check off a credit card but I didn't
realize how
much he made. I don't have that
much credit
available on all my cards
combined. :)

we can take care
of him next week probably

but he needs to
help us not hurt us

even though i
know his site is all about
bitching and
whining

btw,
somethingawful = 0 srunner links

roy7 1/13/2001 1:25 pm:

Hurmph.

I wonder
what the best way to monetize
something
like SA is. It's popular (6m+ page
views),
kinda famous (Ars are fans), and has a
very loyal
following. Not sure if it's
something
you can sell branded advertising
for, like a
"real" humor site.

ya .. u cant sell
advertising on it.. its all
cussing
bitching whining

advertisers wont
like it

however, u can do
srunner type of stuff

like amd

like mad

and xdrive

and everything

because its a
community

but we cant make
money if he doesnt promote
our stuff

on a daily basis

remember taht one
day he had srunner link (he
was whining
about it).. and it got lot of
clicks

but i highly
doubt he'll do all this for us

roy7 1/13/2001 1:27 pm:

The tune will
change once he's paid again. :)

roy7 1/13/2001 1:28 pm:

And once he's at
S4R and forums work or, if
they crash,
someone can reboot them.

"really survive" meaning, losing some of them
is hardly going to kill us.

yeah im sure we'll survive, i have no doubts..
its time for restructuring and streamlinging
and losing the garbage

our basic to cover.. rent & payroll isnt tons
(200k)

and some of the bills..we'll just have to make
payment plans on.. and really, i'd like to get
total 100% of our bills to 500k/month and
revenues to go upto 1 mil..

and glide on that for a little bit.. while
saving up $

with or w/o infospace

ok, cool - got the Lowtax stuff. I think
there's something that can definitely be done
there. When it comes down to it he's really
quite reasonable and mature (at least compared
to many of the others). More importantly,
they almost all respect him to a certain
degree so if he's not anti- then maybe some of
them are less so.

He can help us without transparently being our
puppet I suspect, and should be willing to do
so.

yeah just talk to him.. tell him that we think
he can be a good spokesperson for efront to
the webmaster community and we want to
completely prioritize him and make sure he's
taken care of

Tim Eckles is taking a beating in the closed
discussion groups though. Gotta love the guy,
he's going toe to toe with people and trying
to bring them down.

i know.. tim is awesome :)

im feeding him info and material :)

if we got SA on our side, then there's more
voice

so thats why i was thinking forget the 13k..
have a heart to heart with him.. does he
really like what he's doing? does he want to
do it instead of getting a regular job? well
we think there's a way that can be done

and work something out with him where he can
continue to do what he enjoys while we get
what we want from him : revenue projects +
pro-efront support 100% no matter what :)

this is truly like the corps huh :) strategy &
intelligence to overthrow the opposition

The salaried thing is something intriguing -
pretty comfortable with that approach? I'm
thinking if we do that he's instantly our
"webmaster advocate". That could be painted
as a real plus. "We know you all are upset,
we're trying to be upfront with you but
communications sometimes break down - so we're
appointing one of your own as the liaison for
all concerns.

yeah.. but he also has to position for us

Heh, it's like the Corps, but even more like
my old counterintelligence work. As stressful
as it can be, it's also a lot of fun.

meaning in good times and bad times he has to
stick together

Well yeah, but obviously we wouldn't position
it that way to the webmasters.

and we'll make sure he never gets evicted as
long as we're around :)

Dunno, I won't go into any of that with him
until I have a good idea of where his head is.

thats true

well see what u can do :)

Will do. I need to run - will talk to you
later. =)

if we turn his site into member-only we can
make alot from email makreting too :) ok later

We'll reign the webmasters in - may just take
a few days. Once they're under control it
will be easy to separate some of them from the
flock and quietly (and peacefully) trim them
off.

yup

this is probably a good thing all this
happened.. then we can finally control them..
they were like a wild herd before :)

oy7: (5:42 pm:

) http://www.lumthemad.net

Whoa that's odd. They claim we are throwing in
the towel and fired most of our staff last
month.
sam: (5:43 pm:

) thats because of stupid SA
posts
sam: (5:43 pm:

) he blatantly violated our NDA
sam: (5:43 pm:

) so i doubt he's getting paid
next week
sam: (5:44 pm:

) before some of our other
webmasters
sam: (5:44 pm:

) who are in more need
sam: (5:44 pm:

) so he needs to retract what he
said or..

heh.. tim from aah wants to take over doing PA
cartoons:)

he said he'll make fun of lazy,
web-generation, immature whiny kiddies :)

iBLAMEj00 (ICQ#8906076) Wrote:
I know an artist that would probably love to
do it. =)

[another options.. kick PA guys out and we can
do the comics ourselves]

their email basically said they are not going
to cooperate with us.. thereby they are in
breach of the entire contract.. which means we
fire them and have no further obligations to
them

if you can work on restrucutirng some of the
agreements, i think that would help alot..
like SA gets 2cpm.. thats obscene and can't
last ..lot of them like that

iBLAMEj00 (ICQ#8906076) Wrote:
Okay, artist is all lined up

Yeah, I can move into restructuring people.

Re: PA, let me have 24 hours to see what I
can do. Presuming I can get them to talk at
all. I don't have a copy of their email,
would you fwd when you get a chance?

Tims's saying that the first storyline from
the new artist is about PA :)

yes..

I have a copy of that one. Did they send one
today declining our out contract?

no they didnt

but i was being proactive

Ahh, okay.

i was telling jonathan in the future, we kick
these guys out

and do the content ourselves

we have alot of resources through all the ppl
on our team

we can always find someone to do the content

even if it sux :)

i was saying that because they said in their
email they refused to put our stuff up, and
thus breach oruagreement, we have a right to
fire them as well

and hire other ppl toservice the website

Ah, heh - okay. I thought they rejected our
'out' offer - I was completely flabbergasted.

infospace sent us another termsheet

today

Better?

man.. not much room to negotiate

getting better everytime

but still not what we want

maybe time to cut bait and go for it huh

getting infosapce will give us some $, time to
regroup, and $ in the bank as well

With the timing maybe. Don't think any one of
us would take a deal like that seriously
except from where we're sitting right now at
this moment. It does buy us time though, and
time is the one thing we really need. Our
capacity for success and stability isn't the
issue, having the time to put it in place is.

its not a ton of money.. but enough to help us
buy timewhich is the most important thing

yup exactly

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

btw, fyi, jerry wont be in all week.. his
grandfather passed away

he's flying to ohio 2morrow

Yeah I heard. Spoke with him briefly this
afternoon too. Never good to hear stuff like
that.

yeah i know

also, before we announce the infospace deal,
i'd like to restructure all our webmaster
agreements

that way we can cry we're in the poorhouse..
etc.

otherwise it'll be tougher afterwards

and we do want to do that because the
infospace money isnt alot and we have to give
all of it back.. so we need to conserve every
penny

so me and you can work on that i think..
we'll go through the contracts, and as part of
going back to the websites we'll call them and
say this is the offer wed' like to propose to
move forward because of the ad climate

what do u think

I think it will be fine. Some of them have to
see it coming. We can even think about
allowing contingencies that return the
structure to its original form if X, Y, and Z
happen. But may not even have to go to great
lengths.

Do we have a list of the biggest money holes?

mpog

jus kidding ha ha

ill get you a list of all the sites and stuff
tomorrow

Heh, true probably.

OK, sounds good.

so we can work on this project.. and im going
to work w/ dennis to try to push the infospc
fwd:.. having a $3 bil company invest in us
will give us alot of crediblity huh?

Would almost have to. Although I still think
that despite the bad press we still stand up
pretty straight on our own merits.

i know.. but we want to kill all of that once
and for all and show that we've adapted
considerably.. that we're bring services to
our user base, nto banners.. and evolving w/
the net

actually you know who would be a good swat
team person to work with you on
restructurings?

Tim

Tim & I restrucuted a few contracts already 6
weeks ago

He's really good

hey i m almost done with a list of webmasters
we need to renegotiate with

hey.. g3 briefed me on ur telecon w/ him..
everything looks good it seems.. i have a
spreadsheet from bill schmidt on more
webmaster financials as well.. maybe we can go
over it whenever u have a chance this weekend

Cool, that would be great. Lot of good info
coming together, I hope to start prioritiziing
sites and indetifying what needs to be changed
asap.

hey linda/lotus msged me about helping with
the chinese websites.. and she asked if she
should talk to u about it.. im going to tell
her yes as well.

np, she ICQd me.

efront is a MSP (media services provider) that
provides services and solutions to media
business through eddie (efront delivery
engine) which consists of:

-Technology Division ( Managed Ad Serving &
Mgmt, Content Mgmt & ASP, Managed hosting)
- Syndication (Careers, Directories,
Education, Tech content, Downloads, etc.)
- Marketing Services ( Media Services & Media
Sales)
- Direct Marketing (Lead generation for online
and offline businesses)
- International (deploying the above
internationally)

[btw, some of the concepts we're currently
developing: we're not a media company, we
provide services and solutions to media &
other businesses .. so probably get rid of the
media from our name too :]

efront is a MSP (media services provider) that
provides services and solutions to media
business through eddie (efront delivery
engine) which consists of:

-Technology Division ( Managed Ad Serving &
Mgmt, Content Mgmt & ASP, Managed hosting)
- Syndication (Careers, Directories,
Education, Tech content, Downloads, etc.)
- Marketing Services ( Media Services & Media
Sales)
- Direct Marketing (Lead generation for online
and offline businesses)
- International (deploying the above
internationally)

[btw, some of the concepts we're currently
developing: we're not a media company, we
provide services and solutions to media &
other businesses .. so probably get rid of the
media from our name too :]

hows the renegotiations going

PA Contract:
Don't think we should accept the changes. The
problem is that they could be looking to get
us back or something. If Tim @ AAH or any of
our webmasters or whatever says something bad
about them, they could try to sue us; who
knows?

Tell them that the reality is that if we do
something illegal to them or defame them, they
can sue us anyways regardless of what the
contract says so no need to put it in there.

hey just talking to alot of people right now
(outside efront.. ppl i talked to about
acquiring before.. like napigator etc.) the ad
market isHORRIBLE.. cpms are now 10 cents RON
.. best time to renegotiate:)

ill send you the email for sitepowerup and
teenstatio...we terminated them.. and we just
need to clean it up

Will-I must have an update on the
renegotiations. Feb. 1 is approaching fast.
What are we doing

Linda got me her Asian site feedback today.
Greg is putting criteria together. Jerry is
going to look at the cpmU concept. Once those
are in place we can rip through pretty
quickly. Babynames is being handled this
weekend, as is iswoosh presuming he gets back
to the messages I've been leaving.

ohtop is ready to go.

I've got a basic list of which sites have out
clauses that need to get removed.

What happens on 2/1?

im going through a list / data collection
right now..very interesting.

btw, i just renegotiated one of the sites
(Avfind.com) we owed him 65k on his contract.
i gave him 2 options.
1. 20k and we call it even OR
2. he gets his site back, no questions asked
he chose option #1.. (we'd pay 5k next week,
and rest within a month)

thats another tactic to use

february 1.. we need to get our payable for
february to at least 200k.. because we wont be
able to pay much more than that for the month
of february until we rebuild our revenues
using direct marketing (its working really
good..but they need to ramp up.. takes 2-3
months)

Is our goal to negotiate down what we owe in
back pay or is it to restructure from cpmPVs
to cpmUniques, reduce pay levels where
appripriate as well as remove unhealthy
clauses?

ill email you an interesting file..

ok sent an email..
btw, PA guy left msg on my voicemail.. i
deleted it.. whats up w/ him .. are they ready
to sign

Should be. Was it Mike? Contract is off to
them, they just need to sign and fax.
Expecting it back tomorrow.

yep.. i figured you're taking care of it.
fyi, i also sent yout he new org chart we
introduced to all the employees yesterday
(well in the office).. w/ the new division..
you're part of corporate development, formerly
acquisition.. i asked bill to interface with
you for any contractual and acq. related
matters as well.. so we can try to focus on
revenue stuff :)

Sounds good. I think once the cpmU stuff is
in place we have a real opportunity to cut $
down. Plus with the distinct possibility that
some expensive sites might bail - that helps
as well. Re: 2/1 - even ones we do after that
we'll grandfather back to a 2/1 effective
date. I'll check on the legality of that, but
it shouldn't present an issue.

okay no problem. btw, i think best thing is
to do is renegotiate the length as well.

going forward, i'd like to get lump sum cash
contracts.. much cleaner and we have full
control. most of the sites we own outright,
we have people run it for 200--500/month (i
dont know how you spend 4k :) i get 10 sites
we own outright run for 200$/month and they
run good:)

Heh, Babynames walks and that's an extra $16k
free a month, and we only lose 6MM PVs and
just over 500k uniques. Can replace that
easily with smaller cheaper sites in the same
market.

36 -> 18? 24? 12?

yes i agree.. with cash only deals..they work
really good from deployment standpoint as
well. the way i structured these in the past
were like this:
* 25k cash
* 30 day due diligence, then 5k
* 30 day where they redesign it to our
standards, move it over and 10k
* 30 days warranty support 10k

and we're done!

pretty smart huh:) we only say.. 25k upfront
cash

in the contract we outline how this is broken
down

Any recurring money after that?

and if they come back, we just say this is to
protect ourselves and make sure its moved over

no ..ZERO

i have like 5 sits like this..theyre great

Wow, how do they support their staff? Or
don't they have any?

just consultants.. pay them 200 to 500 a
month.. i have alot of kids work for us

i have access to 50 kids

h.s. kids everywhere

Ahh, okay.

i can get as many

better than working in mcdonadlsl

and they'll do anything we say.. in terms of
design, etc

and most of the sites are easy to maintain
once they have the traffic

no stocks, nothing

of course, you probably cant do it with sites
like themeworld etc.,

but those are few and far between

most sites that have 5k to 25k visitors a day
you can do that

which is majority of our sites

pretty neat huh? that makes life easier for
everyone..and gives us a huge cashcow
long-term..

Actually, themeworld I think is a one man
show. Static content sites that would really
work for (cheats, pics, etc.). It's dynamic
content sites that it would be harder to work.

actually funny thing is that

the sites i did those deals for ARE dynamic
sites

No kidding.

bytecenter.com totally CGI

avfind.com.. i did the site renegotiation
today.. and got a perl programmer kid
(200/month) whos going to take it over

gldev.com is same way.. mysql

skinz.org.. is owned by us 100% .. different
people running it.. we pay each guy 500/month

you get the idea

i can find resources to run sites.. thats
never a problem

the spreadsheet is interesting

Good lord - we pay indianmasala 10k a month?

Always hard to remember what the market
allowed this time last year. =)

i think so.. brian did the deal..

only 2-3 months ago

we need to reduce that

this was kinda building up.. remember i sent
that email out 3 months ago concerning how cpm
rates are falling etc. and dont pay more than
1 cpm on most sites :)

out in the trenches, you kind of start to get
an idea.. its okay though..

most of the sites.. we either renegotiate, or
give back the sites

i thnk the best way to increase our margins is
to reduce the length of the term

Certainly.

upfront cash (3 month).. or one year
(themeworld type of sites)

So you've been taking a % of the total cash
value from the original contract? How are you
determining how much cash they're given?

as low as i can get them :)

depends on their needs.. economic hardship,
etc. :)

i basically say original contract doesnt mean
squat

Using Megagames as an example, we pay them 30k
over 36 months - that's $1.08M before you
consider equity 'value' etc.

make Xyz with us.. or make 10 cent cpm out
there in the market

I see. So it's less about the old deal than
it is a new.

I gotchya.

and better to do just cash payment

than going from 3 year to 1 year

because if u do that, they'll know you're
trying to reduce the payments

Right.

Can we afford to pay out such large lumps to
people all at once?

and the excuse to use is that.. we're having
hard time deploying campaigns etc. we have 3
options really..
1. you take the site back (ill hve to talk it
internally)
2. we renegotiate the contract based on
uniques, etc.
3. we make a reasonable cash payment and call
it even

well, structure it so that the cash isnt all
at once

(some now, some for warranty support,
etc...and drag it out over 3 months)

and not make it so large.. like avfind.com ..
made it from 75k to 20k

Was 75k the total he would have made over the
term of his agreement?

his term was expriing feb 28, 2001
we hadnt paid him since oct. 2000.. he was
getting basically 15k/month..

(3 cpm.. yikes)

he agreed to the new stuf.. i just have to
send it to him and make sure he doesnt change
his mind.. nice site too.. and decent traffic
AND we can put a srunner link next to each
song :)

did u see the spreadsheet i gave u

I see. I'm just trying to apply the model to
sites that have very large amounts that will
build up over the next few years. Megagames
for example is over #$1MM. Even if we brought
that down to $150k that would be $20k more a
month than we pay him now ($30k).

Yeah, I'm looking it over now.

yeah..megagames would be hard to do.. i'd
leave him till last i think

until he relly gets in a jam $ wise

he was already

at some point in the future, we might be able
to take the site for 2 payments of 50k a
piece.. that sounds bad i know :)

or at least reduce it

personally, i'd skip that site for now

OK I see, so there is a sweet spot for this
process. Sites closer to term on their
agreements in a cash bind so anxious and
willing to get a sum of cash in the short term
instead of more in the long.

And obviously we position "more in the long"
to be more like "questions about any in the
long".

yeah.. somethingawful.. the site isnt a site
without him.. so we need to keep him

we should get him for 4k/month flat or
something

have u talked to him about renegotiation

yeah questions about any in the long :)

I've planted the seeds but haven't really gone
in depth yet.

and we never talk about suing them or screwing
them.. worst case, they get their site back..

we threaten them with giving their sites back

thats not so bad is it:)

of course, if they want us to keep it thats
fine too

they have to get in line like the rest of our
webmasters to collect

Not at all. It never is when the choice is in
their hands.

We're telling them what we need to do in order
to get them money, and saying we understand if
that doesn't work for them and being kind
enough to ignore the ownership agreement.

just looking at some of the contracts, etc. in
terms of lump sum payments, we'd put them #1
on the priority list to get paid

At least that's the approach.

our to 36 sites generate 80% of our daily
visitors

1.3 mil / 1.6 mil = 81%

OK so;

Lumps of cash (cut way the hell down) -or-
Shorter contract based on cpmU with modern
cash scale -or-
Site back

Yes?

With the focus obviously being on the sites
making the most and/or those in the top 36.

yes.. although we dont want to give the site
back if we can help it.. we just threaten it

for ex., at a few times, avfind said,.. ok ill
just take my site back.

of course response was.. 'okay so you dont
want any cash then right'

then he said.. oh wait.. well hm

do u hae most of the contracts

Almost all, yeah.

Those I don't Kevin will FAX me as I need them

we dont want to give any of the 1 year
contracts one back either

Of course. Too close to owning outright.

how are you guys holding up? pretty good? jan
31 payment is on time.. feb 15 is uncertain
right now.. (negotiating w/ about.com right
now) ..and webmasters would have to be first
then

Holding up fine at present. How long of a
delay do you anticipate (if any) on 2/15?

really hard to tell.. i'd like to not any
delay if i can help it. we have these
possiblities:
* about.com done (they are upto 200k now..
they owe us 450k.. and im trying to settle for
300k + get a new contract)
* infosapce is now in the due diligence phase
* meeting with reznor, etc. (geocities
founders).. for possible funding
* other a/r.. although gotta pay webmasters
first

We'll all play it by ear and see what happens.
We survived the last delay, if it happens
again I'm sure everyone can pull it out again.

yeah .. i just want to renegotiate so we dont
have a snowball effect.. in terms of a/p
building up.. thats the important thing

Oh yeah, if anything is a knockout punch its
multiplied a/p's.

yeah thats why this is like really important
stuff :)

so our in-house bulldog is taking the lead on
this then .. you :)

got any idea on how you're going to re-work
SA?

No, going to think about it a bit.

With all of this I don't have to wait for the
cmpU stuff at least. Should be able to
contact a lot of these people this weekend.

i can get u the cpmU stuff tonight.. i havent
looked at the ohtop stuff.. that should be
easy to evaluate

btw, sites like indianmasala (i jsut went
there) .. has their own serach engine im sure
they're making $ from

No rush. I suspec tthat will be the least
taken option.

basically use audit/violation as an excuse too

Going to pull Brian in on some of these. Any
issue?

when it comes to them taking the stite back,
dont promise they can have it back.. say that
shouldnt be a problem..but u need to get it
approved, etc.

np

no not at all..

indianmasala also uses mailbits

(for example..) t

dont mess w/ subnet.. i negotiated the poor
guy down 2 times already :) his original
contract was 3 cpm

np, we'll use whatever we can to help.

ill see if i can renegotiate him 1 more time..
he's actully good.. im going to give him all
the mp3 sites to run

the ones that end in 2001.. im pretty positive
you can work out a lump sum arrangement .

I doubt there's a question. For them it's a
matter of "here's X guaranteed and in short
order, or Y maybe - maybe not over a longer
time".

Not one of them will opt to wait longer.

ya i know.. u can get it for like 10-20 cents
on the dollar..

Those are going to be the cakewalks. It's the
ones that get a good amount for a much longer
period of time that will be the battle. Even
those should see the value though.

yeah.. megagames would be a battle.. you can
try your hands at it if you want.. i said last
cuz i antitcipt a lbattle :)

Well, I'm going to work on the soft underbelly
first. When the easy ones are dealt with we
can afford to spend more time on the tough
outer shell.

If nothing else, MG might be a better
candidate for cpmU and thus lower payments.

yeah..although megagames is a flat 30k / month

and his unique are good

and his traffic increases

and his pv/visitor ratio is good

Our ace on that one is that our association
with him also hurts us with our relationships
with game producers and PR firms.

yeah thats a beter ace

Well, them maybe just reduce the 30k. Don't
know - won't worry about that one until
there's time to joust.

He's widely considered to be a pro-piracy
site. I have no stance on that myself, but
it's a tool.

yeah.. when we make him gaming.efront.com,
we'll remove the crack section..and make it
hidden

yeah good tool

btw, just read your cpmU email

only one problem i hae

wanna hear it

Anyway, I'm going to run. Will track Brian
down first thing and hopefully can deal with
Jennifer Moss early. We'll see how many of
the 'easy' ones we can crack down on tomorrow
and Sunday. I'll very likely need some
contracts here and there I don't have. Will
someone be around?

Absolutely.

Shoot.

we're trying to tie it back to the cpm.. which
means banner, etc.

ideally, it'd be nice to know how much we can
really make $ per daily visitor.. then use
that data to figure out what the "cpm" model
might be.. then try to think what a reasonable
salary would be if they have high traffic..
then give them something in the neighborhood
of a decent salary using the cpmU model @ the
same time, making sure that their cost vs.
overall $ per daily visitor is just 20% so
gives us a 80% slush factor

bottom line, we need to have an idea on how
much $ per visitor we can make :)

its a good start..but @ some point, we'd need
to take that into consideration.. for
incremental visitors added to the network (we
cant add unlimited either..)

Certainly.

ill try to give u an idea of how much $ /
visitor we can make using the short track
history we have with the d.m. and other
programs

okay.. talk to u later.. good night..thanks:)

It will be tough to define a baseline for our
profit margin per user with the rollercoaster
that is the industry. But we can look at the
lows and average it out.

OK, cya.

thats why the lump sum cash 3 month thing is
the best deal ever i think .. the 33 months is
ours to monetize :) okay cha

okay cya

any luck on reneogitations??

progress? update? even one renegotiated
successfully?

PA is done, Jerry will have the info from them
tonight. EMUX is the first straight target
because of the $100k clause on their contract
which comes up in a month. Just got the
contract on them this afternoon from Kevin, so
we should be calling them tomorrow. iSwoosh
and BabyNames have been impossible to reach so
far, but we're still trying.

how bout the rest?

Emux is taking the lead since that's the most
urgent.

Have to get a resolution on that asap. There
are a few other fairly urgent ones we're going
to tackle after that. Brian and I are going
to collaberate on the emux family, then I
expect we'll start splitting up sites from
there. Obviously BN, iS and PA have fit in
where and as possible.

any thought on plan of attack?

i duno.. we are dead dead dead in the water if
we dont reduce our payable.. so they're all
urgent

emux is one contract @ 100k..and even if we
owe them, we cant pay them..even if they take
their site back (eventually we will) .. but
the rest of them we probably want to keep on
an ongoing basis so..

ok. Might be best if you, Jerry and I (Brian
too maybe) conf on all of this. I think I'm
getting different concepts of where our
priorities are. Want to make sure we're
getting done what's most important.

That'll actually be good - can find out which
sites you two think are most expendable.
Helps to know whose ass we can just kick and
whose we're best not to. =)

how did the call w/ jennifer go

She had to run while I was still on with Jerry
and the EFG group. She's making herself
available first thing tomorrow.

okay just checking :) any luck with the
others? i think that we'll see how the results
go.. then within 24 to 48 hours, have myself +
you + scott p. here + maybe brian even work on
this in a swat team manner and focus on just
this either thursday or friday or
fri,sat,sun,mon

Also, Rich at SA has cooled off a lot. Seems
he just let the stress get to him. I think we
still let him chill a bit and then approach
him later if need be. In the meantime if tech
can make his stable, we can get him to 100%
compliance which will help.

yeah lot of the webmasters.. if they dont
cooperate, i prefer not to threaten them.. but
re-vistit later

to be honest w/ you, ive not had one problem
with anyone.. i always worked things out..
just drag it out and they come to their sense

Agree there. It's just a tough time, some
people just need to vent.

Pill popping time. I'll drop you a line
tomorrow afternoon with some sort of status
update on where we are with the key sites.

mame, asta, megagames, babynames, freevote,
etc. etc.

http://www.pdquick.com/checkout/OurAffiliates.
sp?AC=12

just ordered food.. babynames.com is listed
there!

update on renegotiations?

We've been in touch with iswoosh, babynames,
megagames, indianmasala and mame.dk today. IS
is basically taken care of, he's actually open
to a whole new contract if he stays. Jenn
(BN) just needs to talk with her partners but
seems open to change. MG and IM were just
initial contact. MDK cares most about equity
incentives on future growth. His traffic
seems completely legit, so we'll do that and
use it to cap the $ and deal with compliance.

who is IS

Trying to track down hebus.com, xaviersite.com
and astalavista.com as well. Sub-net is on
the short list, but noone seems to know where
that contract is.

ISwoosh.

ok.. even taking notes and feeling them out is
a great start :)

Yep. We're well into Babynames, mame.dk and
iswoosh. Don't have a read on the others yet.
So far I think people are being positive
about helping take steps to solidify the
security.

okay.. dont make any offers.. but get them
moving towards the gaosl.. just get a feel for
things.. and go through as many sites as you
can

Don't make offers?

http://yahoofin.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-46710
8.html?tag=pt.yahoofin.financefeed..ne

well sure make offers.. if you know what kind
of offers to make?

if you give me an example of an offer or two
you'd like to make, i an take a quick look at
it and amke sure we're on the right track

I know what the elements are we can't have on
the contracts. I think I know which sites are
ones we should really try and keep and which
ones would be less of a loss. Familiar with
what CPMs are appropriate.

If there are issues beyond that though, then
perhaps I'm not familiar enough with our
goals. Clearly some of these cases are going
to require decisions on either your part or
Jerry's or both regardless.

my main concern is cashflow

Understand that completely.

as low as possible..even being creative in how
to achieve that

so i just wanted to get an idea on some of the
offers

I'll shoot you any we come up with tomorrow
based on the follow-up convos we have.

okay great

is brian involved in the process as well

Yes. I pulled him in on iswoosh since he's so
familiar with newsletter issues. And I'm
having him start the ball rolling with
indianmasala since he closed the deal. Jon is
involved with babynames with me since he has a
rapport with Jenn. Using people where/when it
will smooth the process.

k

any lump sum deal possibilties? :) (besides
mpog:)

All of these deals besides iswoosh are large
value and long term contracts. None of them
will really fit into that model.

We'll see a lot more opportunities on that
front when we get into the mid to small range
sites.

ya i figured that

esp. middle

probably doenst make sense to do that with ppl
making 300/month.. we'll have to pay that to
someone else anywyas

Exactly. The ones making 2000-4000 are
probably prime.

although stas was making 18k/month.. and we
got him down to 25k total..saved 150k :) tim
helped me on that :) (aah_

Big drop. Stas has been an odd one all along
with us running it.

well mostly our techs dropped the ball
somewhat on it.. :/ i was just on the phone
3way w/ nate & s4r guys.. plan to have 99%
uptime within 24 hours.. actino steps, etc.

That will help a lot.

never have techies project manage :)

That will help a lot.

Heh. Hmm, ICQ is being flakey.

also going forward, i know what w'ere going to
do with payables no matter what

What's that?

we'll always pay everyone something, no matter
how small.. so that way it keeps them going

and less complains.. and the news is alrady
out

as we have the $.. so we dont have a major
crises again..but more of a one on one
situation..as the cash warrants.. easier to
manage.. and no image to protect now :)

update?

any offers for me to look at?

mame.dk is willing to come down from what we
surrently owe them per month which is 31.5k
down to 23.5k and both lower and cap any
further scales.

23k??????

we've never paid them that

they are on crack

they are earning ZERO right now

According to their contract we currently owe
them 31.5k a month.

no webguide.. and we told everyone we're
counting webguide impressions as of december
15

how do you calculate?

26MM PVs.

nope

?

we told everyone we count by webguide
pageviews

their webguide pageviews = ZERO

They have no issue putting the webguide up and
being compliant in the future.

well they havent made anything in january

we told everyone on december 15th

We don't host them btw, I presume you know
that. They cover their own hosting at
60Mbit/sec.

thats their problem really.. its all illegal
roms anyways

Agree.

SA is also willing to come down on his pay
level. But he too wants a firm plan on how
payments are going to come.

btw, do you know we're using the webguide
impressoins? the stuff they see on
efrontsupport is only their banner impressions

I know we told people that.

we'll give everyone a report soon on what
their webguide counts were

for january

also mame has not put srunner or anything

lets work on an offer sheet for them and you
can present it

anyone else?

BabyNames folks are still talking. iSwoosh is
fine with $2800 but is also concerned about
back pay.

iswoosh.. whats the issue, what are we
offering, etc?

Don't know where Brian is with IndianMasala,
was going to follow up with him tomorrow.

He felt we owed about $4k for his mailing
lists, we say $2800. He's agreed to take
$2800 and go, but he also wants to talk about
his back pay.

does he want the sites back?

He's willing to either leave, or stick around
under a new contract. If he sticks around, he
wants the mailing list back.

did you tell him chapter 11 or anything

my goal is to get him outta here, no backpay..
take the site back and call it even

is that doable under any scenario you can
think of?

any angle :)

That's what we'll tell him we're willing to
do. I suspect he'll take it.

Witht he $2800 that is.

okay.. next?

btw, im trying to pull up mame stats

you're saying he has 26 mil pageviews/month
now??

That's basically it. I saw the Megagames
emails. Not sure where you want to go with
that. Sub-net contract still seems to be
missing.

Somewhere in there, yes. We've looked at it
closely too and it all seems legit.

megagames.. well i dunno.. good email huh :)
well imnot sure.. i just wanted to set the
tone and give you leverage

Expected some form of cheating, but there are
no signs.

Good ratios, no indication of placing banners
on other sites, etc.

of course those are non-payable pageviews
since he doesnt have webguide, but that was
for january.. moving forward, anyway we can
cap mame.dk to 10k?

of course, his ctr% suck

They claim that doesn't cover the hosting.
Then again, they say they're under an NDA on
what they pay for hosting and can't tell us.

We can get them to 10k or even less if we host
them.

But that's more than we want.

they OWN their own isp haha

so its free

we can host them.. but they cant putillegal
roms as downloads on our servers:)

its better for us to put the html on our
servers.. so we have control

so make a deal.. 10k tops.. we host it.. of
course, we're not goign to allow rom downloads
on our servers.. so they have to link off

and we got our 10k

hows that sound.. is that too sneaky :)

Might work, certainly no harm in trying.

if they agree to wipe the past payments as
well.. and make it a one year contract, we
vest more shares

does that work

It may, I'll take it to them. We willing to
let them go?

sure.. but tell them sponsors suck out there..
noone is accepting anything..worst case, we'll
have to let them go.. or we'll be filing
chapter 11.. they're welcome to try to hunt
for sponsors themselves

(also all paymetns will be net 60)

OK, we'll see what they say. Have a call
already set up with them.

this is fun huh :)

Heh, not sure fun is the word. It's
interesting and necessary at the least.

next?

That's all the action at present more or less.
Any idea where sub-net contract might be?

ill find it.. it might be under 'seekmp3'

i renegotiated poor Johan twice alread

Ah, ok. I'll drop Kevin a line about that.

it was @ 3cpm first (chris howard deal)

Oh yeah - that one.

Want to leave him alone then?

my plan was to take all the other 1 year mp3
site deals

and give them to johan to mantain

and tell him he has to maintain the traffic
level

so all mp3 sites are under him

Sounds like a decent plan. Still doing it?

yup.. just need to work the other mp3
sites..buy'em out or whatever

he is 'on our team' meaning one of our
emploees then..and he puts srunner or anything

my ultimate plan to have like 10
super-webmasters..that run our sites and
deploy whatever we need easy and fast

Brian asked if we're comfortable trading
equity on some ratio for cash on some of these
deals, thoughts?

yes of course

Figured.

but we want to shorten the timeframe, reduce
the cash, net 60, etc.

trying to cram it all together

Right.

u know what happend to snowbball today right

blank ads

Yeah, saw the PR.

all that goes to help us

Makes us look a little more friendly to our
webmasters. That's some nasty stuff over
there.

yeah.. we do some weak stuff too because of
the market.. but our webmastrs are all
sticking it out..

so we must not be that bad

BN wants to know how were handling our
payables to the law firm, CAIS, etc. She's
worried about sticking around only to have us
sued and BK. Thoughts?

What we're doing is better than what most of
those other groups are.

Only area I hear complaints about is lack of
communication.

thats a tough one.. actually we're going to be
suing CAIs ourselves..

pillsubury has equity in efront and works with
us

good relationship

OK, that will help appease her.

CAIS provided no service to us whatsoeve.r.and
we're drafting documents to sue them right nw

Wouldn't be in their best interests to hurt
what they have equity in.

yeah exactky

Cool, actually that will help a lot.

if you can reduce the monthly payments

and get rid of the 2 ml etc

She seems willing to address all the issues.
Her out, her value guarantee, and her pay.

offer them their site back against BK
protection

Still talking with her team though.

i would give their site back to them ni a
heartbeat

if something happens

to us

Right, np. I told her that our previous offer
to walk should be a good enough indication
that we always work with people even if it
sometimes goes outside the contract. She
seemed to accept that.

any idea on how you would do megagames?

Brian is going to approach a battery of
mid-range sites tomorrow and over the weekend
btw.

information gathering and tsuff would be great

then we can talk about deal terms, points,
offers

and go back and make them

that builds rapports and stuff ,..and seems
like we're doing it slowly.. the 3 G's:
Gather Info
Go over Offer
Get it done

Same as the rest. The approach we've been
using a bit is basically establishing the
obvious elements - poor market, banners dead,
competitors dying, etc. etc. - and letting
them find their own way to what we want to do.
SA offered to drop his pay without me ever
directly bringing it up.

really? :)

Seems to be working this way, also serves to
make them feel like they're more part of the
team by getting involved.

i think realistically, we shouldnt pay anyone
more than what they can make as a good salary

We're definitely channeling them towards the
goals, but letting them work towards it in
their own heads.

i mean a real nice comfy slaary

Right. Most so far seem completely on board
with that.

tlel them that.. hey you're doing this, you're
not struggling.. comfy lifestyle

any thougts on megagames?

Was just rebrowsing the emails. I think a
very similar approach. "Things you can do to
not just help yourself, but all the other
webmasters."

Megagames goals:
No outclause.
20k/month fixed
Help us on revenue projects.

what do ut hink

yeah

Part of that of course being 100% and instant
compliance.

Going to suggest that the struggle we're
having now could have been prevented or at
least lessened had people knuckled down and
participated instead of standing around
whining.

They know what it's like to not see money now
- that should be a strong motivator to help
make sure it doesn't happen again.

yeah.. and that its not too late.. but we need
to streamling and cut costs as the market
doesnt support this

It's like Jerry Maguire - "Help me, help you".

yeah

were u surprised by megagames's reply

I was actually.

Rolled over with his tail between his legs
quickly.

well most of the things we said was true, hows
he going to argue bout that :)

Which is good, he's on weak ground to argue
on.

he did actually work rpetty hard

He didn't comply period. Helped dig this hole
we're in. No defense for that.

i believehim on that

Oh I know - I think he's going to be easier
than we thought to be honest.

yeah.. the trick for him would be to kill the
past payables or somethign

tell him he's already getting it with the ipo

or add it to the end of the contract

Or at least defer all or most till a liquidity
event.

Right.

and pay him 20 or 25k/month.. that we can
afford that on a consistent basis

every penny saved helps :)

our goal is 150k/month payable

I think he'll be fine on that front. We'll
see.

Getting him down on $ that is.

25/150 = 16%

50/300 = 16%

Does someone have a breakdown of what we owe
every site for Jan?

Bill S. maybe?

yeah jonathan has to put the traffic stuff
together and get matt's help in coutning the
webguides per site

no.. it starts from traffic first

traffic calculates web guide impressions per
site

then gives to bill s. and he plugs it into his
spreadsheet

OK cool - I'll touch base with Jon then. It
will be a big help to see exactly how it's all
going to add up and where best to come down
more.

yup

im actively driving the sales guys

That spreadsheet will be the biggest help I
think. Time frame on that?

on the direct marketing

Yeah, we've given EFG some really solid leads.
Sounds like they're panning out but hard to
tell.

hmm.. ask jonathan to get the right ppl
involved and give us a timeframe.. hopefully
by next mon/tues?

yeah .. efg is the most shakiest one

OK, will do and will let you know.

not really sure on that

we're cutting more payroll too

200 right now

we're out sourcing accounting & hr

Mike heading out then? I know his name has
come up before.

nad i told bill s. to keep the core ppl,
accounting, and take 150k and deduct it.. then
tell me how much we have to cut

basiclaly, i want bill s. to say ok we need to
cut 30k or whatever to come up to 150k in
payroll

then we'll go through and try to make cuts

Right.

probably mike, rad, chris h. maybe, maybe
brad,

people who arent producing/contributing

as much as they could

What's our plan on the next payout to
webmasters?

im pretty sure we can come upto 150k..and we
have to pay everyone something.. otherwise,
things build up

Not 2/19 - whatever's after.

well im gonig to settle w/ about.com and get
that out to the webmasters

oh u mean after

Yeah.

i want to make it net 60

One of the most common questions.

and the goal is to get past payment lumped
elsewhere

and we're building up our nonbanner revnues
right nw

so the a/r should take care of it when the net
60 kicks in

so our timing would work well

and we dont have the baggage of the hit we
dtook with killing our banner business

and we turned things around fast

Yeah, I've basically benn telling them that a
lot of that depends on webmaster willingness
to make some relatively minor changes for the
good of both their peers and the company (thus
their own checks).

makes for a good spin and story on why we need
net 60 and why we need to lump it at the end

everything has to flow..and ppl have to see a
light at the end of the tunnel

benn=been.

if february payments arent due until april 30

and 150k

we'd be in awesome shape

awesome awesome

dont u think

Absolutely. Clearly that's what we'll shoot
for.

i'd like to be able to renegotiate w/ everyone
and pay them

after we negotiate

so that brings them to the table

Right

in terms of negotiating with us :)

this could work real nicely

pretty good plan huh?

Good opportunity to clean a little house too.

Some sites can just plain go.

yup exactly.. and i want to kill our websites
to like 125

from all

i put a good list together

in my proposal to about.. ill fwd to u

just a sec

i spent 4 hours doing that yesterday

Wow. Great though, all the extra vision we
get helps.

check your email.. interesting

i took our 125 best sites and categorized
them..and added a description to each site :)

Yeah, that's a great list. I'll
cross-reference that with the other data I
have to give a better idea of who gets a
litlle more rope, or a little less.

The sites that can go are going to be simple.
We'll simply make whatever offer suits us
best. They can take it or leave it. Little
to no dialog needed.

Anyway, time for more pills. Going to get
running. We should be talking with Megagames
tomorrow (going to pull Jon in since he closed
him). Will let you know how that goes, and
when we should see the traffic data pulled
into the spreadsheet.

'night.

sounds good..thanks!

feel free to msg me if u need anything. ..
this is priority stuff..cya

hey Will hows it going..any update?

i'd like to offer $1cpm per daily unique user

Nothing of any real significance to report
yet. Progress on BN and SA. Brian's working
with IndianMasala but they aren't happy. Put
together a list of sites for him to jump on,
going to go over everything in greater detail
with him this weekend when he's back online.

$1cpm per unique translates to $0.17cpm on PVs
for most of our sites. I'd like to get them
for that too but we probably can't.

im talking to Tim eckel right now

he said valueclick is not accepting any more
members either

nonags wants back in

i think the market rate out there is about 10
cent cpm

what do you estimte

For RON stuff I think it is too.

so anything above that we'd be losing out :)

I guess it depends on the site. RON levels
don't represent what an average level is for
sites with RON + placed sales. PA for example
will likely be close to a 2cpm in Feb despite
a .10cpm (or so) RON level.

really? how will PA make 2cp

Direct sales.

will they be able to do it every month on a
long term basis

Certainly not. Or at least I don't believe
so. They of course do, but time will prove
otherwise.

they're still running our banners.. weird

Then again, market should start to readjust
to. We're as low as it's going to get right
now IMO.

never mind.. that was my cache

I think they're completely down right now.

you think? i think wwe're going to get even
lower.. that banner advertising wont even
exist for indepdant sites

i just cant see how :)

Even the ad networks are going to have to go
beyond the banner. Much below .10cpm though
and it's not worth anyones bother.

But independants can't survive on their own
for long, totally agree with you there.

yeah.. u know if we have to lose some of the
sites, so be it

we can pick them up cheaply

after they leave and teest the market

and see that its bad

Yep.

nonags already emailed me

ill fwd to u.. its funny

Heh, how was he inflating?

he wasnt

probably refrsh rates

that he was used to when he was with us

we sent jennifer money friday

jerry called and said she was going to
cooperate in everyway

Yeah, Jerry told me. I think she's going to
really come through. We'll see.

and reduce the payments too

Yep.

hope she does..

have u had a chance to analyze the sites and
come up w/ a game plan.. like what we want

i think we can add 3 more resources.. to cover
all the site

tim, myself, and scott p.

what i'd like to do is go through the
spreadsheet..and enter a column as to the
different scenarios.. and what we want.. and
send that to everyone .. and assign the sites
to everyone's names

I think it's just a matter of trying to go
through all of the special cases one by one
and get them to come down. Once we do that we
probably want to deal witht he bulk sites in
batch.

so everyone has a global idea of everything

Right now our focus is simply to reduce money
and as a secondary, get nonworkable clauses
off of the contracts.

ya

$1 cpm per daily unique = $50k/month in
webmaster expenses

our goal is 150k/month webmaster expenses tops

so we could go as high as $3cpm

per daily unique

and if there are some higher than $3cpm.. than
we'd have to get some lower

2 mil daily visitors * 30 days = 60 mil/month
* $2.5 cpm = 150k

hows that sound

thats at least logical

and can work with our model.. otherwise we
wont be able to make payments on a consistent
basis

We're better served just to deal with everyone
all at once in that case.

you know if we deal w/ everyone @ once, we're
likely to risk class action.. and news posts

if we send mass emails

dont u think

also, we have to remind them that 100k/month
is used for servers, bandwidth, technical
resources

so theoreticlly, we're allocating 250k for
them

Raises the risk, certainly. They communicate
enough with one another though that there may
be a greater risk to take that to them
individually and they figure out that it's
everyone.

Thinking about it though, mass emails are a
bad idea.

ya i wouldnt risk mass emails.. eeee

however,

if we have a good plan and stuff

we can immobilize like 10 of our people

and divide up the webmater list

with the same consistent plan

so they dont have to negotiate

but rather persuade

What this means of course is that we'll lose
the good sites and keep the weak ones.

Strong sites will go off and test the market.
May well come back, but they'll go.

we'll make exceptions for strong site

and try to get the weak sites to below 2.5

so we average 2.5

that means like megagames makes 15k instead of
30k

not too bad

Here's an example of where our problems will
be. Babynames has 759k viewers. Even at a
10cpmU it's less than 1/2 where she is now.
Put her at a 5 it's $3795.00, at 3 it's
$2277.00.

yeah i see .. she was an expensive site huh

well, we might have to make an exception for
her

Lemme go through and plug that model in to see
where it works nicely and where we'll have
snags.

I've got all the data in front of me.

perfect.. im going through the stuff too..
just thinking

Only thing I'm missing is what we pay some of
these guys now. But hopefully Bill will have
something on that this week.

i can help u w/ that if u need somehting

did you ever get the esimtation from bill that
was sent like 2-3 weeks ago

For Megagames it would actually be a good
model. 6MM viewers would be $15k as you said.
That's not too bad.

works good for altavista too

did you get the email concerning astalavista

guess what

i got someone to bite already

on $2 cpm

big site

should we make the monthly payout variable?
meaning that up or down, $1 to $2.5 cpm on the
dialy uniques.. or should we keep the same
scale

and have a max

Moreaulf: (4:43 pm:

) Hi sam.
It's going allright. the $500 saved me for
this month.

Exitpopup running on the new datacenter

Gamepages under move now.

How's it going for you? eFront?
sam: (4:43 pm:

) its going okay.. really
difficult.. ad market is very bad.. even
valueclick is not taking more clients
sam: (4:44 pm:

) we probably have to renegotiate
everyones contracts..or we wont be able to
survive
sam: (4:44 pm:

) :/
Moreaulf: (4:44 pm:

) I hear it from all over :(
Feels like it's no use not even having banners
on the pages somehow. It cost more than it
gives to try get

[this is the way im approaching things.. and
lot of sympathetic ears out there]

any thoughts on the email? i was going to add
ac ouple more things but wanted to run it by u

iBLAMEj00: (9:45 AM) I got 0.63% CTR with cj
and .52% with valueclick.
iBLAMEj00: (9:45 AM) How about just make it
required that ads can't be placed at the top
or the bottom.

oops to the wrong person

were u able to talk to brian this weekend

No, he hasn't been on. I sent him some ICQs
and emails, but not sure if he got them.
Going to see if I can track him down tomorrow
so I can go over strategem at least on the
sites he has.

ive done 3 sites already.. easy

one of the webmasters wants to work for us
$200/month or so.. so i asked him to
renegotiate .. and ill give him some euroipean
sites.. he's excited..then afterwards, he'll
work for g3 and deploy stuff..anything.. just
go in the website code and change stuff when
we need to

i just need to get a contract ready i think

we're very close on megagames.. tim & i are
working.. he agreed to $ /unique.. just
getting the price lower.

mame.dk would probably agree to it too

we have a sweet proposal we're working out w/
harsha:)

please give me a recap of todays negotiations

but anyways, to recap, here's how i want the
contracts to incorporate the backpay:
1. Retroactive with the new schedule until
they got paid last.
2. Take it as lump sum thats payable @ the end
of their contract.

If they doint agree to new payment terms, here
are the options:
1. They can walk -- no hard feelings; we're
even. We'll provide another month or so of
free hosting.
2. They can take the banners and we do the
non-banner creatives + free hosting

I want all contracts to began @ no later than
feb 1.
Basically, tell them that if we don't get
everyone's cooperationg, we might have to file
Chapter 11 because the market has changed and
we cant be in business if our expenses are
higher than what banner revrenues make. It's
worse out there then they think; even
valueclick wont accept new customers.

update?

Beyond the numbers I told you yesterday,
AthlonOC wants out, theSeek, Riva3D, Classical
and Astalavista seem to want to stay.

we'll accomodate athoc most likely

i had a few q's toi ask u about the addendum

almost done getting them drafted

hey

are you there? btw, almost done w/ the
addendum.. need to have it proofed.

Will, we have another deal structure that came
up.. you might want to take a look at it.

Yeah, where is it?

basically, the deal came up w/ freeskills.com
been working with andy

they had 100k and they were just going to ride
it out and not budge

after a long battle, this was agreed to:

* no ipo clause, no returning the site, no $$
back to them, no monthly payments to them,
they dont work on the site anymore
* we give them a % of the site's revenue as
royalty forever (5%)

what do u think of that structure :)

I always get a little fidgety around the term
"forever" in contracts, but other than that
it's a pretty sweet deal.

i agree.. but its like software royalty or
something.. perpetualy royalty

the sites that want to walk, maybe we dcan
throw this at them

Yeah, I agree. I think it's a great deal.

Heh, for us anyway.

i know.. andy and i were fighting with them
all morning.. theyre making my bronchtitis
worse:)

and they suggested it.. and i told andy
great.. pounce on it right away :)

Heh, a little slice of my life there!
Bronchitis is fun stuff.

its getting really bad.. hard to breathe.. and
lot of coughing

did yours ever go away?

Yeah, I basically perpetually have it.

oh really

It goes away here and there if I take antis,
but only for a week or so. Then it's back.

i havent seen a doctor yet.. maybe i should

Oh yeah.

I don't mess around with that stuff anymore.
All my problems started with the flu. I blew
it off and it snowballed. =)

Steam helps a lot. So if it gets real bad
take a hot shower or bath.

i just did .. i feel better.. btw, i think it
bronchtitis.. whats the symptoms

You can feel it down in your chest/bronchial
tubes. It almost feels like you've sucked a
little water down, esp when you take a deep
breath. Lots of coughing, difficulty
breathing, sometimes you lose you voice a bit.

You can either be coughing stuff up or not.

Doc will put you on Amoxicillin or Biaxin or
something. Should clear up in a few days.

They don't have the first clue how to beat
mine. Mostly because they have no idea what's
causing it.

that sounds like mine.. i cant develop it in 2
days can i ?

i should go to the doc today

Only real danger is bronchitis turning into
pneumonia. Other than that it's just a pain
in the ass.

after i get u the addendum:)

Oh sure - any cold or flu can turn quickly
into it.

Tons of water helps too.

Heh.

my heater in the apartment sux too

when its on i cant breathe

maybe it has bacteria?

What kind of heater?

Is it also a humidifier of any sort?

no.. just central heating

Hard to say. Could just be the dry air
though. I can't go to the mall, movie
theaters or anything like that - dry air shuts
me down instantly. Last movie I saw was
Remember the Titans, literally took me a week
to recover.

Make sure to tell the doc about the breathing
problems with the hot air on.

really? wow.. and i was actually enjoying
benig sick so i get to stay home for the first
time in forever

Heh

i should really take care of this thing then

secretly, i was wishing it got worse:)

Heh

As long as it doesn't stick around forever
that wouldn't be too bad.

ok i msged drazen to pick me up to go to the
doctor.. let me get the addendum over. any
other updates on the other sies?

Nothing huge, most everyone is willing to stay
happily. I'm trying to knock out BabyNames
and maybe SomethingAwful today.

oh btw, jerry was telling me SA wants to work
for us

and i told jerry then Will can do a two in one
deal

make him an employee and his site comes along

Asta is willing to take a $ cut, have to deal
with him over email - phone call didn't go so
well. Neither one of us knew what the other
was saying.

and jerry said it would take some doing but it
could be doable

hehe

OK, I'll put some thought into how that might
work with SA.

i definitely wnanna keep asta.. great unique

i thought about this for SA:

Yeah, he seems to want to stay.

25k uniques * 30 = 750k * 2.5cpm = 1600
add another 2000 or something for salary

3600/month or even 4000/month = 48k/year w/
benefits

that way we can pay him more than what we'd
pay him normally

Do we have an idea of what he would be doing?

ill fwd uy the msg from jerry

ok cool.

does that give u an idea of how jerry wants to
use him? im not sure if it will work myself..

but hey we reduce the $

are u sure his contract says 2cpm?

It doesn't say that, but it works out to that.

6 million pageviews and 12k/month?

8m/16k a month I think.

hey came back form the doc..long line..they
gave me medicine..

coughs died down a little bit:) just been on
the phone collectinng, etc.

ill send u the addendum soonnn.. :) btw, scott
p. is working on 4-5 deals (ad contracts) and
maybe you can take the sites assigned to him
and divide it between u and brian if you guys
are on pace alrady

since u guys are on pace..and we dont want to
teach him about all this in a short time..and
i'd rather he concentrate on revenues..and u
guys are making good progress alread

Yeah, no problem at all. Was he on the
spreadsheet you sent or was it just Brian,
myself you and Tim?

he was on it too

OK cool. I'll coordinate with Brian and we'll
split those up. Revenues are good.

yeah.. im having him pursue ad networks and
about.com type of deads.. he's having good
luck with b2bworks.com, engageb2b, and
work.com.. the hot deals

Bman: (4:46 pm:

) I have been swapping calls
with a lawyer type who wants to help us settle
our payables. I want to offer 10% to akamai,
alexa, global center, maybe cais and a couple
others.
sam: (4:47 pm:

) how much doe he want?
sam: (4:48 pm:

) btw, Will Bryant seems very
good at that kind of stuff.. maybe he can do
that, if the lawyer wants too much

[you might want to talk to Bill S. to see if
its something u can do :]

Will do. Might be worth trying in-house
before we pay an atty.

can u give me joanna's icq

(im @ home)

will i added lkanguage to cancel
ipo-outclauses

did you see that

Yeah, it looks good - although we may have to
doctor that a bit for some people. BabyNames
for example wants to retain an out in the
event of a BK.

yup.. no prob

Like the clause though - for the most part it
means less doctoring on the individual deals.

can u handle that (doctoring it up for special
cases)
also, we want to stricken out all the IPO
money

Certainly.

im trying to get a hold of the about guys..
we're going to accept their last offer @ 215k
(they owe us double that).. cuz we dont have
time.. and payroll is due:)

so we should be getting that out soon as well

I've got something on SA - want me to run
through it real quick?

yes

We can have him FT plus have him continue
working on SA (both during and more outside
the normal workday) for a little less than $6k
a month.

It basically works out to $24k a year for the
site, $45k a year for the employment.

But it would all be rolled in together
obviously, so figure $5750 a month.

well what if he doesnt work out as an
employeee.. meaning we're taking a chance that
he will. so i'd prefer to do 2 agreements..
one for website

and one for employment

We can do that too. 24k and 45k. We might
have to put some extra protections in for him
that way (in case he gets fired, etc.). As is
he's coming down from 16k to 5.75k, if we
fired him he'd go from 16k to 2k.

But I think we can do that.

thats still 70k/year.. did you try to pitch
the 48k.. what did he say to that

He's highly motivated to try and help the
company, be a liaison with the webmasters,
help effect positive improvements across the
board, etc. So my feeling is he's going to be
a real asset.

He feels that's 24k a year to work FT or close
to FT and he can't justify that.

i just want to make sure we can pay ppl.. im
cutting back on a few more ppl this week

i had let Randy, one of the sales guys go
yesterday.. but he begged to be stayed..saying
he has 2 i/os coming in.. he did get one done
today...so he has short stay

our other webmaster relations people dont
really make 45k.. for example, alex makes
24k/year.. and pinocho less.

how about this. 2$ cpm on uniques on his site
+ 35k/year job

which is the range we're paying webmaster
relations people

and we're doing that as a favor to put more $
in his pocket

not just as a job

Well, it's all to be determined really, but I
see him as more than just webmaster relations.

everyone else we're not offering this

he could very well be.. and if he does great
for us, then he woulc get a raise like
everyone else

g3 started out at 36k and got a raise

I know Jerry met with him, I don't know what
they discussed in terms of exactly what he'd
be doing.

Hmm, how about 35k for a trial period then,
you can define certain benchmarks, if he meets
them he goes to 40, 45 and perhaps 50.

That way he's at 35 now, but he has a vested
interest and opportunity to climb higher based
upon metrics you define?

well, the benchmarks are all subjective.. its
obvious when someone becomes an asset.. for
example, g3

he'll be entitled to raises.. and we have a
precedence for giving people raises if they
really help increase our bottom line in many
areas

i dont want to set a false expectations where
he'll feel entitled to it.. then he'll be
unhappy.. based on subjective evaluation

Yeah, different people different skillsets. I
can only speak so intelligently about the
skillsets of g3 and Rich. I do know that
where g3 lacks is interpersonal
relations/people skills and that's an area
Rich excels in. They both have other skills
with positives and negatives each. g3 for
example is a great organizer, Rich may not be
- don't know.

Basically he's come to these figures based
upon what he feels he needs to sustain his
quality of life and be able to work towards a
gradual improvement.

I'll take 24k/35k to him, just want you to
have the big picture as he relayed it to me.
=)

I see your point though, the milestones
concept for raises seems a little bit like a
minefield for both sides in that light.

i just called jerry

to see what he used him for

ok cool - what did he say?

really, its's not clear to me if we have any
more campaigns to deploy

and he said it was mostly for the website.. i
asked expliclity what rich would be used for

and he wasnt really sure.. do we need more
expenses in webmaster communications? i dont
know

i asked him if we can use him in revenues in
anyway.. he wasnt sure

however, all that being said.. if you do :
$2cpm on total daily uniques
+ employment contract for 35k/year

we can do it

Yeah, I see the point. I guess the underlying
issue is what do we have to pay to keep him.
Clearly it's not $2k. So which makes more
sense for us, seeing what we can pay him as a
webmaster at a min, or going this route to
keep him plus have him in-house for work.

i dont doubt you that he has skills

im just trying to find out what exactly he'd
be doing

and who he'd be reporting to etc.

so try that out.. its not so far from your
offer

Oh, I'm not pitching Rich Kyanka here. Jerry
met with him and told me he's interested in
seeing if hiring him is a way to go.

and tell rich that while he doesnt think it's
fulltime pay

we're doing this as a favor to supplement and
co-opt him

we're not doing this for the other webmasters

I have. It's been my underlying theme.

as a stand-alone candidate, we probably
wouldnt hire him.. we'reputting more resources
in sales

keep trying.. im sure you can get him down
more

I am too.

Bill is making a list of other people for you
to neogitate w/ after the websites are done.

I think this is your calling card:)

np. Are those the people we owe?

yep

If we can be creative with getting back pay to
him, I can get him at 24/35

did you talk to him?

Yep.

let me think about it.

ok

Back pay issue comes from upcoming tax
troubles. All his $ was 1099 last year and he
expects to owe close to or over $10k. He has
0.

but we havent paid him anything for last year

and he said he hasnt been paid from anyone
else either

No, but other companies did at least early on.

for him to owe 10k.. he should've earned @
least 40k:)

2nd half of last year he got almost nothing
because of the market problems and companies
missing or failing to make payments. First
half he took in close to $40k on 1099s.

okay

let me think bout the backpay stuff

i told bill to send me all the $ stuff on all
the websites..and im going to compile backpay
info for everyone tonight

Did that last ICQ go through? It's acting
really screwy on me and doesn't show it in our
history.

The $40k first half 2k one..

yes it did

mame.dk is getting restless btw. We prepared
to let them go? Or how do you want to handle
that? We're looking for around $4k a month,
they're looking for around $24k/mo. They're
hosting their own site. They claim they can't
live with $4k. etc. etc.

I've let them stew a bit and now they seem a
little more anxious. How do you want to play
it?

I haven't turned aggressive on them yet but
that was my next play. Just wanted to touch
base to see where they stand on your
importance perception.

how many daily uniques do they have

Having Jo pull that, one sec.

not important really..but it is a big site..
24k is way too much for that though

we've never paid them 24k

all our past payments to them have been less
than 10k

traffic increase doesnt mean we can monetirze
it..

60983 unique viewers yesterday.

60*30= say 2 mil .. times even 2.5 = 5k....
hmmm

tell them to test the market out ?

brian is using that ploy

tell them the market is zero out there.. tell
them to test it out for a few days

It's hard to think about coming up on an
emulation site. If they don't want to play in
the real world we might think about some of
the less friendly options.

Yeah, I've used that here and there too. Let
me see what they have to say tomorrow and
we'll play it from there.

yeah.. the uniques are nice..but we cant
really pay more than 5k.. we're prepared to
let them walk, yes.

How much are you comfortable paying if they
control their banner inventory?

boy thats tough.. since we're not hosting
either.. i really dont know where their
tfaffic is coming fro

we cant monetize the non-usa traffic in direct
marketing yet

Yeah, it's an odd one.

us companies dont want foreign addresses or
names for d.m.

OK, that actually makes it easier. Lemme see
how they respond tomorrow.

im not sure if thats an option here

i got all the info from bill finally.. so i
should try to get this backpay stuff out to u
guys today (late late)

OK great. Any further thought on the SA
stuff?

illcalculate the backpay and think about it at
the same time

http://www.efront.com/gfx/index3.shtml

fyi, kinda what we'll be launchng shortly

i have a mockup for u.. on how all the sites
will look like

(and so classical.net too)

u there?

Yep

can u talk to brian.. :

Brian Welch?

ok check ur email.. see if u can think of a
good solution.. and then talk to brian

Hmm, okay, I'll bring it up this evening when
I talk with him.

Brian is covered.

thanks

mp

np that is

spreadsheet pretty helpful?

kevin tells me Rich/SA also knows html.. so
that's a +

when u're around.. lets talk about SA

Have a few mins now if you want to talk SA.

hey i got your msg..whenever you're ready

have you been deluged with people yet :)

Heh, it's started a little bit. I expect it
to reall snowball later this week. That's
good though. They're motivated to come to us
which makes the process easier to deal with.

So what are you thinking re: Rich? I know
html is a thought for what he'd be doing.

the 35k/ 24k sounds good.. just thinking about
the backpay.. let me look real quick

ok

have you given any thoughts to what we should
do with mpog?

(jonathan was asking me)

I haven't to be honest. I asked Jon to deal
with it since from where I'm standing right
now it feels like a conflict of interest. So
whatever you and he figure out. =)

im not really sure either.. :) i know u guys
use the $ all for expenses and dont really
make anything off of it..

ill talk to him.. i dont think its a conflict
of interest really.. we're both trying to
figure out how to get the most value from it
..its not like either one of us makes $ from
it :)

btw, on the chinese sites, i'd pay no more
than $1 cpm on the uniques..

linda is online and msging me.. ill tell her
to talk to you for central coordination

do you think we could get away with 50 cent
cpm for the chinese sites?

lotus: (10:18 AM) ok, will we pay them today
or tomorrow? so I can start negotiation for
the new contract then
sam: (10:19 AM) the funds wont be released
until the new contracts are signed.. the new
contract also has it in there the amount to be
paid on signing for the 19th payment

[if you could give her a hand or two..]

lotus: (10:21 AM) but I don't have details
about the new contract site by site

btw, SA's stats are wrong.. weird.. he didnt
do 7 mil imps in december.

trying to come up with a figure right out and
we'll make a deal wioth him

what about this offer for SA:

Make the contract retroactive.
11/9 start date
24k/year website
2500 already paid
3500 balance (to be paid immediately) + 2k
(feb) + 2k (march) should take care of his
taxes
35k/year employee [we're not offering this to
anyone else.. ]

You mean make the site $ retroactive but start
the salary now?

yes

basically null the previous contract with the
new contract, balance due immediately +
35k/year job

Right, np, lemme see if I can track him down.

do u think he'll go for it:)

Hard to tell. I think probably.

btw, that spreadhseet is wrong.. so dont quote
him the backpay from that.. the decemeber
estimate was 5.7 mil pv for him, not 7

anyways, lets try that

ive been talking to linda past hour or two..
if u could fwd her the addendum, etc. i'd
appreciate it

Will do.

also fyi, brian is telling me that the biggest
issue thus far has been backpay@ the end of
their contracts. i offered him two solutions:
1. make the contract retroactive and we'll pay
in 60 days (because the payable is reduced) or
2. make the terms either less than $2 cpm AND
we'll pay 8.1% of the backpay everymonth for a
year.

either way, we have a limited amount of funds
to work with and that's the reality

in case you run into the same issues.

ok great.

He would rather see the back money simply
split up into monthly payments over 12-18
months.

we can do that if he takes a $2cpm on daily
uniques on his site + 1k/month for 18 months

what do you think of that?

Instead of employment, or with?

with

2 instead of 2.5 - is that the difference?

is that toorich?

ya..thats the diff

or 1k/mo for 12 months.. because we are paying
it sooner

than @ the end of the contract

+ he gets employment

and allows us to actually pay it because
reduces our cashflow

Rich will drop to 2.0cpmU if we will pay him
$1k a month of his total back pay every month
until it's complete.

We're basically out of dancing room with him.
So let me know if that works for you.

do you have a copy of his contract i can look
@? i want to get reports run to figure out
his back pay per the contract

but that could be do-able

even a non-signed electornic copy will do if u
can email me

okay.. looks like his total balance is 27,762

so, to recap:

35k/year salary f/t job employment agreement
(at-will like everyone else, but you dont have
to tell him that)

+

2cpmU (looks like 1500/month)

+ 1000/mo until the backpay is met

thats the best we can do right?

Yep.

ok get it done

So how much do you want to give him tomorrow?
$2,500 as listed on the Excel sheet. He says
he has to have something to cover his rent.

in the addendum, you can get rid of the feb 19
payment line and add 1k/month..and you can
make all payments net 30

oh oops

give him february's payment tomorrow

(the 1k

ok

and have him report to g3, ie employment etc.
have g3 take care of it w/ mike frue
paperwork, etc.

i'm going to use him and kevin bowen as a tag
team to deploy all campaigns in the
websites...they know html, they probably work
good together

and bypass the webmasters

Explaination of the new contracts and payments
if they ask:

We've been able to collect a majority of the
A/R (but not all) that was owed to us.
However, because we did not want to have this
drag on or incur a legal battle that could
take awhile to resolve, we made payment
settlements with our past advertisers that
resulted in not collecting 100% of what we
delivered. We have set aside the collections
to pay the webmasters, however, because we
only have a limited amounts of funds because
of the collection settlement to pay out -- we
must prioritize the payments to the websites
that will stay part of eFront. In the
meanwhile, since banner markets have dried up,
we are and have reengineered our model to go
after performace based marketing including
direct marketing. Therefore, going forward,
we need a new contract in place we can pay you
on a stable basis without depending on
banners. We need to get this in place in
order to pay you before going forward;
otherwise there is no sense in going forward
for any of us. The moneys we earn from our
new program will be the cash flow that drives
future payments; hence the need to carry the
backpay forward.

i also gave your icq to Marc DSouza. He's
worked with me in the past on webmaster stuff
and he can renegotiate contracts for you and
talk to webmasters.. just give him a bunch of
sites to work with ( his speciality is mp3
sites )

ok great.

also, you should probably let the webmasters
know that they can get a tax break because
this is asset purcahse, not ordinary income.
that will save them $$ on taxes too

this is a long-term capigal gains.. it will
make their taxes better by as much as 50%
(depending on their tax levels).. no SS and
unemployment taxes either

so a person making 50k/year from us vs ad
networks can expect to save in taxes:

ad networks: ss + income + state+ unemployment
= 25k in taxes

with us, probably 7500/year

What terms did you all agree upon with Harsha?

I know you and Tim were working on him, don't
know where it was left.

iBLAMEj00: (3:41 pm:

) The last time we talked I
said that if he wants to play hardball, I'll
need all his payment from exitfuel and
bottomdollar since going with eFront =)

iBLAMEj00: (3:43 pm:

) He keeps demanding
$30k/month, that he needs that much.
sam: (3:43 pm:

) did he go any l;ower?
iBLAMEj00: (3:43 pm:

) Well, he kinda agreed to
$10k/month and he gets the banner ads at one
point.

OK.

iBLAMEj00: (3:44 pm:

) But he couldn't accept
not getting paid for back months.

iBLAMEj00: (3:44 pm:

) And then he mumbled
something about having to sell his Lexus.

[i had told tim to offer harsha:
1.cancel backpay
2. he gets all banners on megagames for next 3
months

after that its a normal deal back to the
contract..]

he claimed he could make $1.30 cpm on
banners.. so the 3 motnhs of 100 million
banners a month would make him 300k enough to
cover the backpay and our payments for the
next 3 months

and after 3 months, the 30k would be doable
because it would be around cpmU at the rate
his site is growing..

currently, it's 5cpmU

that was the last.. then the emails he's been
sending

OK, I'll deal with him?

ignore the ?

sounds good.. let me know if u need help ..
ill be there..

like we did with SA ..:)

fyi, we also got Harsha a Visa to stay in the
usa or something (jerry got him)

lowtax signed today.

good job

hey im going to san fran for business deals
tomorrow. marc D. is ready to work with you
to try to get more people signed up, so let
him help you

let me know if you need anything or there are
any issues

if u need me tomorrow, my cell # is 714 227
5975

OK will do. Have some mp3 sites for Marc,
I'll touch base with him tomorrow.

Marc: (8:48 pm:

) ya that sounds good...
roy was trying some stuff with vc
today...don't know how that's going...
webmasters are speading rumors that we filed
for chapter 11 btw

[probably supports your theory and stuff..its
all good, helps us negotiate better]

vc?

heh i dunno what he's talking about.. lemme
ask him

sam: (8:51 pm:

) what do u mean roy was talking
to vc
Marc: (8:52 pm:

) valueclick
sam: (8:52 pm:

) btw, which wembasters were
spreading rumor
Marc: (8:52 pm:

) heard it from t-rex
sam: (8:53 pm:

) oh, screw him .. he cheated us
with the 1x1 pixel and i caught him 4 months
ago.. and we kicked him out

btw, i did a deal with Defender, owner of one
of the mp3 sites today.. he gets to maintain
all of our mp3 sites.. for 1cpmU.. for a max
of $2500 per month..he'll maintain 10 sites
for us.

i have to get him a contract..

Hey have you been talking to Thomas about the
renegotiations w/ the french sites?

Swedie (ICQ#20386173) Wrote:
hey,

I haven't recieved any money yet.. and I
haven't recieved and email from Bryan as I
suspected.

Who is that?

just fwding you everything i get

thats demonews.com

I'll ask Brian about them. I asked him to
touch base.

On the ph with Astalavista right now btw.

k

Can you live with breaking their back pay up
every 3mos over like 18 months or something?

that'd be harder and a struggle to do.. but
better than nothing.. we might not live upto
it, but give it a shot...it has to start in 3
months though (obviously)

hm his backpay seems wrong (astalavista) do u
have his contract handy

looking for it now.

$8k base at 6mm pvs, $1100 for ever 1mm above
base.

the new figures would be

5650 for feb 19

19150 backpay balance

I show them as;

11/00 - 11,901,703
12/00 - 9,892,823
01/01 - 8,780,933

no..because in january he used his own banner
and put ours at the bottom. he also had no
webguide

in january we count webguide impressions

That's a little bit less. Hmm.

Ah right, okay.

and you have the nov and dec figures reversed

Hmm, that's strange. I've got the system
reports printed out and they're dated. Must
have been a bug or something.

but thats the new figure according to base
level pay

i dont think bill gave me the right
spreadsheet.. he's prorating the payments
upwards in the same manner its prorated
downwards..

so on big amounts, i'd doublecheck

ok

ok..either way, if u reverse the nov and dec,
its the same payments

also, the figures go through an internal
audit check for cheating, refreshes, pops,
etc. traffic usually does that (drazen used
to)

If we tack on $1k per month, that's the rough
equivalent of paying them a 2.5cpmU anyway.
That work?

MIght be easier than more every 3.

Less impact.

oh u mean no backpay then?

Yeah, we'll stop it when their backpay is
done. So we don't have to pay it forever.

They're at a 2.0

ohh.. i see..hm.. only thing is we have to pay
more every month right..than every 3 months?

(cashflow)

I'm just thinking paying less per month might
be easier than larger amounts every 3.

okay. im okay with that.. and we'll stop it
when his backpay is done?

Obviously we're going to work as many backpays
at the end of the contract (or deal out at
cents on the dollar) with most sites, Asta is
a keeper though.

okay.. you should probably have the flexbility
to do what it takes.. just remember the
parameters.. the less the better, the more in
the future the better

it will allow us to meet our obligations

Certainly. Actually, giving them $1k a month
is less than paying them a 2.5

yeah.. they get good uniques

2.0 = 6814 (+1000 = 7814), 2.5 = 8517.5

They were demanding all the back money up
front before they sign anything.

he didnt go for every 3 months?

aha ok

just so u know, he tried to run different ads
on the top banner.. and i dont hhink he could
find a suitable outlet..he's running text
links there now

We can do like $3k every 3 (they want like 10k
every 3, lol), but I just think it might be
harder on us when it hits.

per mo on this one minimizes the impact.
Basically it equates to us agreeing to pay
them a 2.29cpmU for a while.

yeah.. 1k/mo is fine i suppose.

try not to do more than 5-10 of those.. cuz
then thats 5-10k/month extra for however
long..

also, we're more in a cashflow hole now...it
could be alot better in 3 months because we
have invested people and resources into
diversifying our revenue streams

Yeah. I only see a few sites I'm willing to
talk to about that type of arrangement. Asta
is one of them.

ok.. u might have a pot for each gruop..
like some sites, nothing
some sites @ end of contract only
some sites every quarter over 3 years or 18
months
some sites 1k/mo

helps us spradit

That last group should end up being less than
5

also i changed the SA cntract after u had sent
it

What part?

i made it so that

"total is 27,762, payble atthe following
schedule: 2500 for the first month and 1000
for every month thereafter until whole is
satisfied"

also added net 30

that way his next 1k isnt due until april 30

make sense?

Yeah, it's a lot cleaner. Heh, rushed that
one off.

Cool.

thats ok :) g3 was frantic cuz lowtax barged
into his office saying where's the money. i
told g3 to send him home and make hime come
back lter:)

Heh

Hebus is ready to remove any/all illegal
content. Any issue with bringing them online?

no not at all

lets do it

Thought you were in San Fran today?

first flighth is booked.. next one is @
10:50.. so i might as well work while i wait

What did Hebus have on there causing the
problems?

not really sure.. i didnt even know there was
anyting causing a problem.. marcF just told me
that this morning..but i would imagine maybe
celeb pics

5650 for 2/19 and then 19150 backpay, right?
Or does the 19150 include the 5650?

yup thats right.. 19k is separate

ok thx. Just getting their addendum out.

great.. bill is asking me how much $ we're
going to send out this week..

whats ur guess.. 30-40k worth of backpay?

er feb 19 payments

Almost impossible to guess. I'd certainly say
a fraction of the whole, but the question is
how much.

I'd say 30-40 should cover us for this week.

ok great

If it starts to get close to that we'll tap
dance a little bit and defer people to next
week.

So I'll keep a running tab.

actually id prefer to just get the contracts
signed.. about is sending us 150k .. i signed
the contract today.. so by the time it clears
and all.. we should be ok

ok, then I won't worry about it.

hey.. have you talked to jarretc
(beautifulcelebrities.com). he keeps calling
me.

I'm talking to Scott/Gr right now

brian was working on him i think right

Yeah, Brian was.

i can get him on board.. im talking to him
now.. he hates g3 :)

Heh. There's something to use. =)

Actually Scott gavem e some good ideas. I
asked G3 to setup a meeting with Jo. I want
Jo to send out a weekly newsletter that
actually has good information.. I think she
can do a great job

Yeah, just mentioned that to her. She thinks
it's a good idea.

I want payment stuff, financial stuff in
there, new sites, old sites, new campaigns,
new ideas, etc.

Should we do it so its a newsletter.. or
should we do it like a egroups list so people
can actually respond (mailing list)

Dunno. Lemme do a straw poll with the people
I deal with tomorrow and see what they think.

Then again maybe that confuses the help desk
issue.

We might want that to be the clear and only
vehicle for communication.

yeah.. plus if we dont respond or get
busy..they'l think we 're not communicating

Yeah. Thinking about it now I think a one-way
newsletter is better. It can link to the
helpdesk address each time for questions,
comments, concern.

yeah.. we should do a nice html
newsletter..not the plain text stuff that bill
hodson used to send.. i never read that.. it
was junk :)

Have to admit I didn't either.

Scott -Game Rankings: (7:44 pm:

) Lets talk
hosting for a minute. Right Now PSX Extreme
and I and VGS are all on the sam server. PSX
Extreme is moving out onto his own server. GR
and VGS can move onto his new server and pay
for hosting there instead of eFront paying for
a dedicated machine just for GR and VGS. Cost
would be $450 a month for hosting. I think
that is cheaper than what you are paying right
now for a dedicated machine. I am going
somewhere with this....

[do u know if psxextreme passed on us]

Lemme look

Yeah, they want out.

what was the last cpm we offered them.. 3?

Brian is going to take them 2.5-3. So there's
still a shot.

are you amazed that we have most of the people
accepting @ 2 and such

I've been pretty surprised, yeah.

Glad really. More reasonable people than
non-.

so jarret is all okay huh.. what did he take..
2?

Yep, .2

are most ppl taking backpay @ the end or
mixed?

Mixed. Backpay at the end has been a
stumbling block almost every time.

Tim loves the 75cent cpm idea for backpay idea
:)

Once the contracts are done, if we need to
reduce our backpay or debt on the books, we
can offer that to more people.. or offer it to
people now even :)

Swedie: (7:14 AM) Do you know when I will get
payed .. I mean that 50% of a month deal you
talked about that I'd be getting on the 19th
of Feb.
sam: (7:14 AM) yes.. monday/tuesday..

sam: (7:14 AM) hey let me fwd u to Will Bryant
now
sam: (7:14 AM) he's on

[demonews guy.. looking for contract

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/50/16943.
tml

[harsha always said he could go to euniverse..
oh well]

BLAMEj00: (4:54 AM) Doesn't this guy have some
kind of non-complete in his contract?
http://beautifulsavers.efront.com

Because these sites (and I'm sure others) sure
do look like they are done by the same guy
(just outside eFront).

http://www.beautifulbikini.com
http://www.elitesavers.com
http://www.fabuloussavers.com
http://celebritysavers.com
http://www.sexyfreeamateurs.com

iBLAMEj00: (4:54 AM) Actually, I checked and
they are all registered by the same guy, Gabor
Timis (same guy that's with eFront)? I'm sure
he has other sites too, but I think the plan
is to sell one to efront and promote the
others.

tim sentme that..something to consider whenu
talk to gabor

i believe Marc's last day is tomorrow
(voluntary resignation cuz of stress).. I hope
he find another job quickly. He was a good
asset. At the same we have s4r to do all the
tech stuff so that will help. We're going to
outsource our
hr/payroll/ar/ap/reporting/payables/etc. to
ledgent.com so we outsource that too.. to
streamline stuff.. do you have any experience
with firms like that

Sure don't. Only one I'm familiar with is
ADP, but I don't even know what services they
provide and being so large they probably
aren't very cost effective.

ledgent uses adp too..so they'll continue to
do ourpayroll through adp.. but they're an
outsourced finance division..doing eerything a
to z.. uyou just fax them bills, invoices,
etc. and they put it all together. i had to
cut bill's pay by 30%..and he said he'd have
to find another job.. isaid i can
understand..but i cant afford to accrue salary
anymore.. we'll pay u full amount w/ payroll
and thats it..so he'll start looking around
but be professional and help us through
this..and we're going to look @ ledgent i
think

Ledgent sounds good.

i just read mame's 'you have 30 mins' hehe..
like we'd respond for sure then :)

Yeah, heh. I called them on saying we hadn't
spoken since the first day, they claimed no
other emails had gone back and forth so I
found and forwarded some. They've been oddly
quiet about it since.

I've laid out what we can offer them again, so
we'll see what they get back with. I
literally half suspect a week from now we'll
get another crazy email saying they're being
ignored.

i think they'll accept.. what choices do they
have

Not many. I think they probably will too to
be honest.

thats why i said.. hey ill talk to them.. i
would basically say.. hey i understand
blahblah..but market sucks.. do u have any
better choices? i'd like to find out myself..

Think about Hebus at all? I don't know how
important that one is (it seems to be a
need-to-keep'er), and he's made it clear he
can't accept even a 2.5. Thoughts on what to
do with him? His biggest issue is getting
monthly $ up and sustaining that.

oh ya.. i forgot.. lots going on.. lemme see.

we probalby need to get him on icq

chat conf

because i think the only way is to

keep talking him down

money is money

there's not too many choices

i want to say..

look hi-media kicked us out

your click-thru sucks

maybe you advertise on the english
version..and we'll take the french version

we're losing lots of money on ur site

Yep. He's around most of the afternoon, it
might be effective for me to pull both of you
into an ICQ chat and you can talk a bit. Make
him feel important, he's getting the CEO, etc.
etc.

yeah.. just keep talking him down mostly.. and
say.. hey incrase your unique users..

we're not capping it at 1600/month

increase your unique users..and that helps
both of us

and we should show him our own french
celebrity site we did in a day

as a back up :)

to say we might let him walk

Is that what he is? I've never actually seen
his site. Only time I loaded it was when it
was back up briefly.

well wallpapers mostly

http://megagames.com/ps2/

harsha still has his own click-xchange
affiliates.. sigh

('win a ps2')

You anticipate the ranks are going to thin a
lot more in the near term?

you mean employees?

its mostly under our control.. who we want to
let go or not

Yeah. You mentioned Jon maybe playing a
backup in case of one departure. Just
wondering what the general tone is out there.

its actually pretty good here

they're all happy we're doing this

something everyone agrees with

we're not killing revenue generating stuff or
mission critical stuff

just the fat

they all said that sam you shouldve done it a
month ago

oh you mean Jon is looking around?

Cool. I'm not surprised I guess that Marc
ended up leaving. Obviously he's been
somewhat unhappy for some time.

yeah.. i already had marc crossed out in my
financials i did this past weekend

cuz iknew he would.. and it was okay..cuz we
didnt really needhim

since we have s4r

g3 was panicking a little

i said no.. stop.. use helpdesk.. fwd to
s4r..simple

Heh.

he was like oh they wouldnt want to etc. i
said were paying them a pretty penny.. let
themearn it

none of the people that left, we are going to
replace

only one a layoff technically

so strategic reductions ;)

most of them think its their choice..:)

That's usually the best scenario for everyone.
Mutual breakup.

http://www.babe-site.com/babes/

Heh, funny how simple those sites are and how
much traffic they move.

yeah.. of course jerry threatend to take
comany down etc. like i expected etc. bill had
worked something out with him payments over
time etc. and he came back and said no, thats
not acceptable (we gave him a senior secured
note even for it).. and he wanted a $300k
note.. ha ya riht

so i told bill.. add up all his stuff/exp.
etc. take taxes out.. and pay him the backpay
within 24 hrs.. and i guess there's a small
severance since he washere from the begin. and
thats due in 30 days

and basiclaly he owes the company a note for
his stock

He already all moved out?

so i took all his leverage away by saying
we'll abide by the contract

pick up ur pay within 24 hrs as needed by the
law

and in 30 days, we'll revoe his equity if he
doesnt agree to terms on severance

he was sying'ill bring the company down.. i
can cause problems, etc.' i was like'i dont
care what you do.. its totally irrelevant.. do
whatever u feel like.. we dont care.. we been
through it all, as u already know.. we're
going to follow our agreements and abide by
it'

heh

yeah.. i gave him a termination letter today

because its the 25th

27th

and he had severnace that built up half months
pay every 2 months or something.. so he doesnt
get his last one.. and it separates us for 30
days

lets the employees get all used to everything

then i can deal with him by playing hardball
on the promissory note

hey u have to fight fire w/ fire :)

Yeah. I know he had been working in other
areas, so the change isn't going to be huge
for ppl like Jon and myself. We had limited
contact with him the last few months. Before
it was almost daily, but obviously after the
shift that wasn't needed.

yeah.. same here..he wasnt doing much last 2-3
months

and i asked dennis, bill, etc. in advance..and
they didnt have any problem.. so i said
ok..lets cut that out too.. bettr to cut our
losses now.. cuz he was getting more and more
demanding as the market was getting
down..wanted pay increases, priortized before
other employees, etc. i said noway

so is Jon okay ?

probably alot of changes for him.. but i want
to make sure he doesnt go anywhere:)

Yeah, as far as I know. Like everyone to a
certain degree he and I have talked "what do
we do if" and stuff like that but it's mostly
been tied to "what if eF were to go under",
etc. We don't talk about it much, mostly
because he's got some pretty big distractions
right now. Specifically his house and his
Mom's health.

I have to assume him going into a mortgage is
a sign he's sticking around. I know he's
still going through with that.

yeah i can undertsand that

also im moving traffic from him to scott p...
and having him do programming, ad server
management and admin.. and programming for
that

something he enjoys.. and matt is happy about
that too

I think that will help. I know Jon has said a
few times he's not really happy in traffic.

basically, it looks like 125k payrool, 125k
webmasters, 80k s4r, 40k facilities, 30k
misc.. 50% reduction in expenses.. without
effecting revenues because of reduction in
expenses.. so 400k/month .. we havent had a
400k month in like 10 months.. i think feb
will be 500k.. and march im trying to push for
700k and april 1 mil..that way we start to
save up some $.. and as soon as webmasters are
done..we'll go through and reduce the debt
too..negotiate, etc. like its 1mil.. 300k
pillsbury, 150k cais, 200k backpay (im
negotiating that rightnow)...200k misc.. so i
want to clean all that up.. and cais is in
dispute.. so i think a month or two..and it'll
be wpiedout.

after everything settles down in a few days..
we'll probaly have an employee meeting.. so
we'll get u guys on the phone..and go over
everything

meaning we havent had a rev month that was as
low as 400k in 10 months

dec was 800k..but 50% was uncollectible

That will be great. It's concerning me a bit
how long the sites are taking, but I've pulled
Marc D. in to handle the initial talking to
streamline the process a bit so hopefully that
will help. All the sites seem to come around
with time and a good deal of talking, but that
takes time. I'm concerned about Brian leaving
next week too. I talked briefly with Jon
about maybe jumping in but he wasn't too
comfortable with it.

i can jump in .. and marcd.. and we can pay
brian a bonus for finishing even

like 1000/week as a consultant

so you have that option as well

Yeah, I'll feel him out about that a bit
tomorrow. Perhaps even ask it as a favor. We
can really use him another week or two.

yeah im not sure if jon would be able to
handle it.. i think brian got burned out on
this..lot of friction.. and probably better to
have jon focus on the tech stuff..so we dont
lose him cuz of all that

yeah.. we'll pay himtoo.. so u have that
option

Yeah, I could tell pretty quickly Jon wanted
no part of it. He's conflict averse, which I
knew of course, but some of this isn't
combative so I thought maybe.

We'll get it all figured out

marcD is good at this kind of stuff..really
good

i think we owe himfor nov/dec.. ill tell him
that if u help out on this stuff, we'll get
his nov money soon.. like 2k..and dec money in
30 days.. i had told him we'd work something
out..so he'll be more than happy

That's good to hear - I think putting him as
the first line of defense should really help.
A lot of time is spent just getting people
past the initial shock of what they need to
do. After that it's just working out the
details. Which isn't always easy, but it's
more time effective to break it out.

ok ill prep marcD.. he'll beperfect.. he
handled like 20 affiliates for us.. in the
affiliateprogram.. he made webmasters put up
floating ads and all sorts of stuff.. so he
knows how to talk :)

Anyway, I better crash. Couple sites always
want to keep talking late, but there are
several that want first thing in the morning.
So I'm going to get in as much sleep time as I
can.

k..gnite

Phone will be ringing in about 5 hours. Heh.
That's good though, each one we cover makes
the rest of the job easier.

i should probably get an attorney involved. i
will call one tomorrow and get them started by
giving them the babynames stuff.

Still need that exit agreement template if you
can shoot it over.

oh ya.. k

i cringed when i saw the to: also.. hopefully
noone starts trouble:)

If they do, we'll kill it quick.

on 2nd thought, it might not be so bad to have
discussions going..and everyone sees
stuff..and have an open air ..its a hard time
to do it cuz they'll just complain about
payments irght now:) its hard to kill it on
an open-list w/ all the webmasters addresses..

hopefully hebus signs soon.. im telling bill
to set aside 10k for him already

Well, I don't mean kill it quick by gagging
them, I mean kill it quick by me contacting
anyone who abuses this directly and making
myself plain.

They can talk in the egroups thing - doesn't
need to be by spamming everyone.

thats true

use some marine techniques on them huh :)

Heh, I'm just in a bad mood now, that's all.
I went off on Jo too hard, but she just hasn't
done that before and didn't know better. I
don't know what happened to my suggestion they
use a one-directional list, but hopefully it
will happen now. I guess Greg just assumed
she would know to BCC.

It's her screw-up, I just think it could have
been prevented. Especially had I realized she
was mailing it before she did.

Like I said, just in a nasty mood all around
right now. =)

thats okay.. she said im sorry.. i said dont
worry about it..

kiss and make up with her :)

i dont think greg is technical so he probably
didnt know what you meant

Yeah, I'm not suggesting he dropped the ball
at all. Jo and I are fine, I just made the
point to her that even though someone (even
me) probably should have mentioned to her to
use BCC, she still should have seen the
reasoning for that on her own.

i just emailed u the release.

also, someone took the emails on the
newsletter and invited everyone to the
yahoogroups :) oh well.. i think we're
wrapping up the signing of the biggest sites
anyways.

and also we'll use them talking on the yahoo
groups as violation of the nda.

we should find the owner of the yahoo egruops
list and kick them out :)

Hmm, actually the egroups thing might be a
positive. There's a lot of negativity in
there from time to time, but it's also been a
good way for them to vent. Better yet they
either don't know we're in there or don't care
- but it's a good way for us to keep tabs on
general moods, etc.

thats true yeah.. and when things turn around,
we can use that to deploy campaigns, etc.

Better to have them talking in front of us
than behind us. =)

Actually this is great - someone starts
yapping and we'll just direct them to the
eGroup. Almost as if it was part of our own
plan to foster better communication.

hehe yeah :)

i think someone made this mistake back last
year.. too.. and not one person responded.

Actually I remember that. Was it Bill H.?

yep

pcmech guy is a pain in the neck.. he called
me 5 times and left msgs.. now he just emailed
me saying he got the newsletter, etc. and
wants to know where his counter proposal is
.and lack of comm. is why he wants to leave
efront, yadayada

Strange reaction to the newsletter. That's an
obvious attempt on our part to provide better
communication.

wellthat i didnt respond back in a day to him
or something

any idea how to approach him? im thinking
about giving him the options:

* buy his site back and pay us..
* 4 cpmU even maybe or something + we host to
make it economical
* something

Yeah, they're all that way. As far as they're
concerned, our worlds revolve around each of
them individually. As if they're the only one
out there we need to serve.

Sounds good to me. Can't offer him much more
than that. I spoke with a friend (lawyer)
about all of this to see how far ppl could
possibly go, and really - since we just can't
pay the old rates and we're offering deals to
keep ourselves from going under and in some
cases we're letting people go - he says they
really have no recourse.

Said the only thing outside of renegotiating
or leaving that they could do is simply not
sign anything and hold out to see if the
market corrects.

But there actually can't be a class action
suit.

Which means that even if several got together
to sue, they would have to pay fees out of
pocket. Class action everything is free.

Can't be one because the webmasters aren't a
class that is.

really?

So he says. We didn't go into it much, but
when there's a segment of people who are
clearly defined and not tied to the body they
want to sue by common means (like same
contract terms) - then they can't be treated
as a class.

if they leave, can we make them pay us our
equity interest in the website?

aha i see.. that makes sense

I asked him that but he didn't really have a
clear answer. It was something along the
lines of "grey area, merits to both sides".
He doesn't specialize in property or
contractual law though, and I didn't want him
talking to partners and charging me. =)

yeah.. i do have a new law firm i engaged
today.. gotta pay like a 5k retainer and sign
paper tuesday.. so we have multiple and easier
to juggle bills.. plus this one i got them to
take 33% equity for their bills:)

He did say ppl would have a really tough time
convincing any reputable firm to come after
us. (1) because it's shakey ground with us
offering people solutions and (2) because
individualluy even with the bigger sites the
potential award (which couldn't exceed what
they're owed) isn't enough to really pay for
any real action.

yeah.. btw, babynames never replied to a harsh
email i sent them .. very interesting

i think they're bluffing us

did i fwd u the email

No, don't think so.

I think they have to be bluffing. I'm sure
they talked to a lawyer, but I think they were
probably told that there's nothing to gain
from any action.

im @ my home comp so dont have it.. but
basically they were requesting/demanding dns
changes

i emailed them and cc:'d their lawyer saying
not only are we not going to approve the
changes, we wont do a thing about it until the
conflict is resolved. that they continue to
violate our non-compete policies by having
amazon links there and ignore our requests to
deploy campaigns and holding our books hostage
by disabling the l90 account so we cant
complete our jan/feb financials.. that i am
waiting on an agreement from robert (their
lawyer).. and until this issue is resolved, i
am turning off access to our property
babynames.com to protect our data:)

then jennifer talked to tim

eckel

and he was going down on them too

so she got stressed and logged out

hehe

Heh, wonder why she talked to Tim?

i told him to tell her about the house
example, we dont have money or assets

i think from the egroups list from awhile ago
they had communicated

which is good..cuz tim tells me everything..
and says everything we want to say :)

OK cool, that's helpful.

hey johan msged me.. were u able to talk to
him

Which site is Johan?

sub-net.com, seekmp3, anti-leech, mp3toplist

No, haven't had a chance yet. You can give
him my ICQ and/or email so he hits me and not
you tho. Will get to him asap.

Hebus is arguing about some of the things in
the addendum.

we should stand firm..

what is he arguing about

our biggest thing is we're giving him 10k
right away.. he should be real happy bout that

and use that as leverage

He wants all the stuff about waiving his
rights and claims against eF taken out.
Basically all of 2b.

He doesn't have any outs in his contract, but
we still need that language in there.

He also wants Net15 and not Net30.

lol.

I'm talking to him, but I think he feels like
he needs to work us down on every issue.

ya that wont work.. tell him we need thisi
because we cant have him come back and say you
owe me more money

Crap like this is why I don't have enough
minutes in the day. =)

yeah i know ..thats what i gathered
fromtalking to him :)

he's basically ours.. tell him if we dont get
it done in 24 hours, we'll have to apply the
10k for another webmaster..and he'llh ave to
wait another month for his check :)

cna i see the addendum.. it starts his new
payment on march 1 right

perfect

He's being difficult. He wants a clause in
the addendum that says he gets to keep the
domain name for the term of the agreement.

Sounds like he'll sign this, but he's also
saying he's not going to give up the domain
name until the contract is up. Obviously he's
not within his rights to do that, so unless
you have an issue I'm going to drop this
subject with him if he'll let me.

yeah drop the subject.. we want domain name in
our name

We covered it, he seems okay now.

Told him it's like buying a car. He goes on
the lot today and signs a deal - he leaves
with the car and a promise to pay. If he pays
he keeps it, if he doesn't, the dealership can
repo the car. But he has the car while paying
for it.

No layaway plans in net acqusitions. heh.

hehe

I see Johan's sites are on this release
template you sent me. Are we cutting him
loose? If so, what does he still want for
you/us/me?

nm, wrong sites/person.

no we're not cutting him.. that was stas.net's
sites

Yeah, wrong group of sites.

of the top sites:
megagames ok
mame pending
freevote ok
aracdeathome ok
indiamasala gone
somethingaw ok
babynames limbo
teenstation gone
beautifulwallpapers limbo [this guy has like
10 sites and he uses our sites to direct
traffic to his other sites..gabor timis.. we
gotta stop this.. maybe have him throw all his
sites together + noncompete]
emux - no clue
hebus ok
animenetwork ok
bresso -
xaviersite ok
shulu -
skinz - ok
sub-net - will be ok
demonews - ok
rpgamer -?

We cutting full checks for people whose
contract are up and are leaving? Wavplace for
example, we have $3270 on the books for them.

thats not bad huh

no we cant

make it payment plan?

Yep, absolutely. Just wanted to check.

or if they want all of it now.. make a deal..
like 50% or less even

Yeah, that's not bad at all. re: RPGamer, I
just got an addendum revision back from his
lawyer. I'll send it to you.

or even let them continue maintaining the site
for another 3 month.. and pay them 1123/month

forget that.. i'd rather let him walk..

what do u think

Hard to say. Decent site, but ugly changes to
the addendum.

I'll ID the issues for him and see what he'll
do. If he can't budge then we'll walk him I
guess.

So obviously theres;
3a - 'ownership of the website shall remain
with the developer'
3c - 'accrue interest at the rate of 12%'
and it needs a paragraph killing the outs he
has.

Anything else?

yeah add that paragraph killing his outs too.

and make it state of california

there's no way we're changing the jurisdiction
to washington

I'm tempted to further mark up the one you
sent me with the out killer and killing the
jurisdictional issue and send that as-is.
Present a problem?

no not at all.. i just makred up what i saw
quickly.. keep marking it up.. and do what you
need to do

but the out killer.. dont "highlight" that :)

Oh no, just going to quietly replace it with
the 2b he has.

Woops, forgot to redline...

Is it just the compounded monthly part you
want dead, or the whole interest issue?

what do u think.. i was trying to do it so
tthere's a balance and we dont cross
everything out

Yeah, I agree.

did astalavista sign

cuz they still dont have our banners back up..
or maybe waiting for payments?

I think they're waiting for payment.

ok ill ask bill

Hey, I just got an ICQ from one of the
Penny-Arcade guys. I guess Jerry never signed
and mailed their release. Is that something
we can get done this week? I'm not even sure
where the release is at this point. Jerry had
it last I knew, but I bet I can track down a
copy in my sent folder.

ya send it off to me and i can probably do
that

Just got it off.

what was the last offer w/ pcmech.. do u know

for rpgamer, the balance we have says 10k

how did they get 21k

oh i know how.. they didnt put our webguide up

i dont think they'll cooperate putting new
stuff up

No, I needed to talk to Brian today anyway, so
I'll get the pcmech offer then. I've got to
sit down with him and get caught up on
everything he was working on and get all his
docs.

do u have pcmechs' contract in front of you

The original?

i was wondering when it started.. and if it
was a 3 year dea

yeah

Yeah

im writing back to pcmech.. to see if we can
pull off a hebus-like math

Wait no - that's PCMedia. Don't have PCmech's

pcemdia is pcmech

same ting

ok, lemme pull it up.

Standard agreement. 3 year term starting
6/9/2001. No outs.

RPGamer just caught the 2b change.

well tell him he made changes..and we made
change

cc:d you on the pcmech email.. tell me what u
think

hey do you know much about john graham's
skills..just going through the employee list

fyi..i think marc F. is waiting for the newly
revised addendum or something

Seems Jarret isn't so friendly after all.

jarret..yeh he's a snake ..always pullsthe
switcharoo on u

Yann Stettler is a real problem child too.

There are quite a few people trying to
organize others.

stettler's contract expired i think

who's trying to organize?

Yann at least is conservative. He just wants
to get people together to come to us and
demand more communication. Jarret is trying
to rabblerouse for the sake fo doing damage.

I'll gather some names.

Jarret for sure. I sent you his post.

we shouldkill his account access immediately.

These people have such a deranged concept of
how the law works it scares me. What's worse
is they declare these concepts as fact and
other people eat it up. It's genuinely
frightening. Never seen so much stupidity.
It's really like watching a herd of angry
sheep. None of them know exactly why they're
so worked up and none of them will stand out
alone - but they're mad anyway.

Scott Bedard is calling for an organized
effort but doesn't want to be leader, Jarret
is openly saying he's ready to lead a "union"
against us, "Dietrich" is suggesting they all
pull banners at the same time and put
disparaging comments up about us to force us
into bankruptcy and embarass us.

Actually, "Dietrich" says he doesn't support
that - but he's still suggesting it.

"J.B." from Emuplayer is supporting Yann on
more constructive approaches. He feels (as do
some others) that eF succeeding is them
succeeding. Healthy attitude.

we should stop killing their account access
for violating the nondisclosure what do u
think

and tell them individually we have a record of
everyone who's violating it

At some point we do need to start identifying
problem children and separating them from the
flock. Don't mean kicking them out per se,
but make ourselves clear nonetheless.

we should probably do that sooner rather than
latter

The more I read from Yann, the more
conservative I find him. I don't think he's
one of the problem people at all.

do we even have a problem with him? his
contract expired.. just work out where he
works for 4-5 months and we pay his backpay
off?

I doubt it. He's just talking about wanting
better communication. He doesn't seem bitter
at all.

marc said 5-6 are ready to sign..he just needs
the addendum

Yeah, sent them once but the emails bounced.
Servers been flakey recently. I'll send them
again tonight.

I get a lot of ppl telling me stuff to me
bounces periodically as well. Not sure what's
up.

should i tell scott we're going to terminate
his access or should you

Bedard?

or what do u suggest

yeah

and the addendums does have it so that they
say they are signing this voluntarily, etc. so
they cant get us for duress because of that

Lemme talk to him some more and see what he
has to say. The thing about these folks is
they're friendly in direct convos, but them
turn around and cause problems. A little
annoying.

scott/gr took our banners off already

basically, we have to tell him.. yes we're
late in payments to buy the assets..which
means we're in default and we have to work out
a settlement. yet, you are violating the
nondisclosure clause, which we take seriously
and at this point, we have no choice but to
terminate your access and possibly bringing
the site down until the issue is resolved

anyone else close to signing the contracts
soon?

we're very close to terminating your service
agreement due
to not servicing the site appropriate,
ignoring
the non-competes, and causing irreparable
harm
by ignoring the non-disclosure..

i'm about to send that to scott

i think i have an idea for the whining
webmasters..

i think i reached a deal with indianmasala

marc is msging me he didnt get the addendum..
should i send it to him since your email is
aving problems? do you have a latest
addendum.. or should i send him what i have

Marc: he might be sending it to
[email protected] which is not my addy

[email protected]

is the right addresss

any luck on Johan?

maybe you can give me an update on which
webmaster you're having trouble with on
terms.. and i can step in and help.. i got
indianmasala.com almost worked out

i think it would be best if you let jarret
walk

we have too much celebrity traffic as it is

his traffic has little value to us

Well, walk or no. He seems to have people
gathering around him. Scott Bedard has told
people you're on him about breach of
contract/disclosure btw.

You really need to read this latest post. Did
you get the others I sent you?

yes i did

I'll forward this one then. It's a real
problem. Jarret's up on a soapbox and people
are following him. Something is going to have
to be done.

im sure he's whining about us breaching
contract and pointing out that he is doing
that too

He's going to talk to dblclick to negotiate a
large deal for as many webmasters as will
follow. They'll all cut all our stuff off,
and as many of them that have control over
their domain names are going to put in
redirects.

haha.. good luck :)

i wish it was that easy

I think he's actually breaking the law right
now.

Not sure though.

well, what do you recommend for all this?

Directly interfering with our capacity to
conduct business.

Do we have access to a lawyer?

yes we do

we can havre a conf. call w/ you tuesday @
930am

hows that

or too late?

I think that's a good idea.

Hmm, he has an addendum.

Hasn't faxed though.

who does

Jarret

Just looking at his status.

does he say he doesnt?

oh ok

He under 18?

yes he was

Know if he still is?

i think he might still be

That would help us I think.

Makes his parents liable for his actions.

Good way to put the fear of death in him. If
we can talk to the lawyer tomorrow that's even
better. He has people who have been more than
happy to work with me getting behind him.

I wouldn't say anything to him for the time
being.

Going to be interesting to see how people I
talk to respond to me tomorrow.