One needs to be careful of "only a penny per lookup". At 20 to 50 messages
per day, that's not much. At 200 to 500 messages per day, that's highway
robbery. With intelligent agents, secretaries, and the merging between
USENET and mailing lists, I fully expect to be processing 200 to 500
messages per _hour_ by the end of the century.
I'll try my best to keep up, but carpel tunnel syndrome may slow me down to
only sending half that many messages per hour. :-)
Seriously, though, how much do you feel would be a reasonable amount for a user
to pay per year for a nominal directory listing (maybe a 1000-2000 bytes or so,
but no MPEG home movies available for downloading -- the dating services will
have to pay extra). Would $20 per year sound reasonable? (Less than the annual
fee on most credit cards.) SOMEBODY has to cover the administrative costs, even
if it is run as a charity.
Bob
--------------------------------
Robert R. Jueneman
GTE Laboratories
40 Sylvan Road
Waltham, MA 02254
Internet: Jueneman(_at_)gte(_dot_)com
FAX: 1-617-466-2603
Voice: 1-617-466-2820