On Tue, 14 Feb 1995 Jueneman(_at_)rrj0ppp(_dot_)gte(_dot_)com wrote:
I'd be happy to list customers in a directory for a small or no fee,
especially
if it is an adjunct to another business I'm in. I'd also be willing to give
them a fairly large number of free directory lookups per month.
Er ... I would have thought that others besides your customers would be
interested in looking up those in your directory. e.g. I'd have very
little interest in registering with a fee-based GTE, preferring a
fee-based Australian-owned service (I'm not adverse to paying money, but I
don't want to add to the export of cash out of my country either :-) ). I
do want to be able to communicate with those registered in your service.
Therefore I need to be able to do lookups. Do I need to become a customer
of yours so I can communicate with your other customers? I think this
defeats the purpose of having the directory for PEM. Without a world-wide
digital cash service, billing for lookups will be very difficult.
I'd say your best bet Bob is to set the thing up as a free trial, see what
kind of feedback you get both on the registration and lookup side and then
use that to determine where is the best place to recover costs. Who
knows, maybe I'll be wrong and paying for lookups will work.
There are problems with market researchers grepping directories, but I
suspect that billing them for access won't make one whit of difference.
Who cares if it costs them $1 million to grep your directory if they can
resell filtered versions of it for $20 million? Your time would be better
spent bombing their headquarters and putting them out of business
entirely. :-)
Cheers,
Rhys.
--
Rhys Weatherley, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
E-mail: rhys(_at_)fit(_dot_)qut(_dot_)edu(_dot_)au "net.maturity is knowing
when NOT to followup"