Business is a very simple concept.  You have to pay your bills.  If you have anything left over, you get to smile and spend it as the principals of your business see fit. If you don’t have enough to pay your bills, you either have to raise money to cover the deficit, file bankruptcy and try it again, or go out of business.Simple.

There are no other options. Sure, you can sell, give or throw the business on someone else and make it their problem, but that doesn’t change the math. If(totalcashin<totalbizcashout)=You are now officially a consultant. No exceptions.

No matter what kind of business you have, you absolutely, positively must have a revenue strategy.  No revvie, no survivee.

In the digital world not everyone, particularly those in Silicon Valley, seem to understand that. There seem to be two kinds of startup companies. The first understands this concept and knows going in exactly what they are going to sell, to who, what they hope to sell it for, their hoped for margins and just as importantly, who will sell it and how. When they model their business, they model the least expensive way to get into and stay in business with the focus on reaching profitability within months rather than years.  They aren’t modeling in an exit strategy. They recognize that any company that is profitable gives them choices. They can meximize their ownership percentages. They can pay themselves an amount commensurate with their profitability. They can go public. Or they can sell.  Profits provide choice.

The 2nd kind of startup relies purely on financial models to justify their future revenue streams.  They create a company hoping to generate enough volume in whatever it is they hope to sell around, traffic, users,  whatever. The goal is to then find a way to monetize all the volume or to execute on an exit strategy. They spend a ton of time playing with spreadsheet models. They are experts at plugging in CPMs, pageviews, unique users, sell through rates.  They also know how to list “comps”. Companies that they hope to emulate and if they have only some subset of their success will more than generate enough revenue to fulfill their exit strategy. They are projection warriors.  Perfectly reasonable, right ? Right, if you understand the reasoning of the people who fund these types of startups.

Venture Capitalists (VCs) tend to fall in love with concepts.  They have the same problem that NBA GMs and Owners often do in evaluating players.  We both see our last success in the promise of our next opportunity.

Entrepreneurs who start companies with the required, expected and motivating stars in their eyes usually forget  the  VC model for funding these types of companies. What’s the Venture Capital funding model ? Fund 10, hope the 1 or 2 winners more than makes up for the 8 or 9 losers.  That’s right. Most VCs expect to have at least an  80pct failure rate.  Which in turn means that 9 out of 10 of the entrepreneurs behind these types of “make it up on volume’ companies will end up as “consultants” .

On the flipside, if you talk to any company I have ever invested in, the only thing I care about are profitable sales. What are you selling?  How hard are you working at selling? What are your revenues ? Why are you paying yourselves a salary rather than a commission ? What unique initiatives are you working on to generate sales TODAY.

When I invest in companies, I expect 100pct of them to be successful and grow and QUICKLY be profitable.  I may  not hit many homeruns, but I sure hit a lot of singles and doubles and rarely strike out.

Whats the point of all this and how does it apply to success and motivation ?

If you are an entrepreneur and looking at starting a company, its VERY easy to put off the hard part.  Which is generating sales for your company and making a profit.  Believe it or not, its  far easier to go out and raise enough money so you are “in the game”. You can raise the money, start the company and take your chances.  If you run out of money, you can raise more. Until you can’t. At which point you enter the world of consulting, having learned from your experience.

On the flip side, if you want to start and grow a business that you retain control of, put money in the bank from  and can make a long term commitment to, then always remember that sales should be the first thing you focus on when you wake up in the morning.  Profitable Sales to happy customers is the best path to making money. If you go to bed at night thinking about how to sell more and how to make your customers happy. You probably are in a good place.  If you go to bed and wake up thinking about how to raise money to stay in business, you might as well get the new business cards and think about what your new consulting blog is going to look like

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When a topic is fun. Its fun. So why not write some more about it.

Im guessing that write now some kid is writing a facebook clone, that probably uses FaceBook Connect and tell his or her friends that it will be just like FaceBook, except that you have to be in school.  You have to use a .edu email address in order to be able to take part in this new social network.

No parents.  No grandparents, no aunts or uncles out of school. Your boss from McDonalds cant peak, and best of all, when you graduate, those same people wont be able to see any of the stupid pictures you posted when you were drunk.

Of course the irony is that this is exactly how facebook got started. You had to have an edu email address until a few years ago.

In the world of free, today’s products are tomorrow’s product features. You have to keep growing and growing so that your advertising revenue covers the company’s growing expenses and expectations rather than accepting the product lifecycle and using it to your financial advantage.

Here is a question for you. Which choice would have created the greatest return for Facebooks Investor’s, staying focused on the .edu subset of users they started with, or being on the growth treadmill that has required them to raise who knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars ?

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Great catch from the folks over at TechCrunch. In their post “What the hell happened to the free version of Google Apps” ,   they take note that Google is doing everything possible to channel new users of Google Apps to the paid version.  This apparent shift in Google strategy regarding free raises some interesting questions:

1. Google is building a significant reseller channel.  The channel is responsible for selling into corporate accounts.  Obviously resellers of Google products don’t want to compete with free from Google. Which raises the question, “What is the better platform for selling into corporations, the web or direct sales ?”. 

2. Is Google now following the MicroSoft lead ?   It may well be that we have seen a bifurcation of the free model between corporate and consumer sales.  Free has its place with consumers, but where does it work and prevail with corporations ?  MicroSoft has long been a proponent of online products being free for consumers, but charge the hell out of corporations every chance you get.   Google tried to fight this model for a long time, merely dipping its toe into selling into corporations.  Are they now pulling an about face ?

3.  Has Google realized that at least in the corporate market (B2B), if you live by free, you die by free ? That the rising expectations of support and product enhancements by corporations never end and are expensive to live up to ?

Are there examples of companies who have been able to survive with an exclusively free model in the B2B space ?

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The problem with companies who have built their business around free is that it is far from free to remain successful.

The more success you have in delivering free, the more expensive it is to stay at the top. The more success you have, the more important it is to management to remain successful.  The more important remaining successful is to management, the more money they will spend, the more chances they will take, the more infrastructure they will build, the more people they will hire.  All of the things that will prevent them from staying lean , mean and flexible. All of the things that distract them from innovating within their core competency.

Lets look at the rule that eventually KILLS all freemium based content plays:

There will always be a company that replaces you. At some point your BlackSwan competitor will appear and they will kick  your ass. Their product will be better or more interesting or just better marketed than yours, and it also will be free.  They will be Facebook to your Myspace, or Myspace to your Friendster or Google to your Yahoo.  You get the point.  Someone out there with a better idea will raise a bunch of money, give it away for free, build scale and charge less to reach the audience. Or will be differentiated enough, and important enough to the audience to maybe even charge more. Who knows. But they will kick your ass and you will be in trouble.

For Google, who lives and dies by free, we dont know who their BlackSwan company will be. But we all know it will happen don’t we ? The only question is when. Of course Google knows it as well. Which is exactly why they invest in everything and anything they possibly can that they believe can create another business they can depend on in the future.  They are spending incredible amounts of money in search of the “next big Google thing”.  When their BlackSwan competitor appears, they won’t be in a position to compete with the newly presented model, particularly if its free based because their ecosystem has bloated to the point where they can no longer create anything for free.

Google is not unique. The same happens to all companies based on free.

The same will happen to Facebook, Twitter, pick any company who lives off of free.

Its not that they can’t make money offering free. They can , have and will. The problem is that they know that its literally  impossible  to be the king of the mountain forever. But that won’t stop them from trying. And that is exactly what will kill them.

Their better choice would be to run the company as profitably as possible, focusing only on those things that generate revenue and put cash in the bank.  More importantly, when you see your BlackSwan company appear and you know they will kick your ass, rather than ramping up to try to compete, get out. Sell. Or maximize cash and pay your shareholders every penny you have.

Like every company in the free space, your lifecycle has come to its conclusion. Don’t fight it. Admit it.  Profit from it.

Which is exactly what MySpace should do.  Rather than trying to reinvent itself to compete better with Facebook, they should do the exact opposite. They should try to optimize whatever monetization opportunities it has. Cut costs to the bone. Maximize revenue per user. Think purely in terms of business.  Squeeze every nickel out of it that they possibly can, knowing its going to die a long, slow death.  Meanwhile, they have the opportunity to take that money and invest it where they think some young company is preparing to become Google/Facebook/Whoever’s black swan.  They can invest alone, or along side others. It doesnt matter.  What does matter is recognizing that they have a better chance of beating Facebook by investing in a company they think can pre empt Facebook than by trying to reconfigure MySpace to be that company.

When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free. Your best bet is to recognize where you are in your company’s lifecycle and maximize your profits rather than try to extend your stay at the top.

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With the publication of Chris Anderson’s new book Free, the discussion about the role of free, today and in the future has expanded.  Articles from Malcom Gladwell in New Yorker, and Seth Godin discuss the various merits and challenges of Free.  Is Free inevitable ? Is Free the beginning of the end ? Let me answer the question.

First of all, what we are experiencing right now is “Better Than Free”. The videos on Youtube, magazine articles, newspapers reports, anything that used to be analog that now is digital have a perceived value that is based on their legacy delivery.  We value all those TV shows on Hulu highly because we assign a value to what we pay for cable or satellite. We assign a high perceived value to newspaper and magazine reports based on the years we spent paying for them.  Anything that we paid for as recently as last year, that we now get free, of course we assign a  value of more than free.  That makes it worth the effort to find it for free. Because the effort is worth your time. You are getting something for nothing, who doesnt want that ?

Of course that is a challenge for those industries. Not only do they face the challenge of their former customers wanting  their content for nothing, but they have the problem that their costs are based upon their ability to sell their content.

There in lies the problem for the free movement. The subsidies of pro content producers from the newspaper and magazine industries will disappear as those businesses contract significantly. What happens then ?

You get the music industry.  Anyone can create any song for no cost, and they do.  The problem of course is getting your music to stand out among the millions of songs available at any given moment. Its expensive. Very, very expensive.  (If it werent for groupies, would the number of musical artists contract 90pct ?  )

The future of content outside of the music industry is exactly what you are now seeing inside the music industry.  The music industry  uses what they have learned from more than 10 years of competing with free.  First they cut the size of their organizations to the bone, keeping just those they hope and pray will know best how to guide them through the world of free.

Those survivors have learned or are learning how to identify the music and artists that best fit the new world of free.  They learn how to work with the artists and those willing to pay for music in some form, whether CD, Download, Licensing or in concert, and do their best to maximize the return on their investment.  They use free as a weapon. They use free as an asset. They use it anywhere they can leverage it into something more. Something hopefully profitable.

What they music industry realizes that they  have to offer quite a bit of music for free. What they have learned however, is that they dont have to allow it to be freely distributed. They can and do control where its delivered. You can have it for free, if thats how you want it, but you have to come get it where we want you to get it. On our websites. On websites we co produce with Youtube or Hulu or whoever. If you want it for free, you have to go through the exhausting effort of clicking to our website and giving us something in value in return. It may be your attention. It may be your interest. It may be a referral or your email address. We give you something free, you give us something that costs you nothing.

The music is often free, but it is NEVER freely distributed.

The TV and Movie business are realizing this is the case. Hence TV Anywhere. They will give you access to content for free if you are already a customer of their distributors. And before you IT ALL HAS TO BE FREE BIGOTS EXPLODE, even google requires you have internet access of some kind, which costs you in subscription fees , taxes or coffee.

Newspapers are catching flack for saying there should be copyrights on their news reports and the summaries. They are right. Their work, their ability to control it. They should have the right to control where it appears. If, as Chris Anderson and others suggest, there will be plenty of content creators and the quality of the work is sufficient for consumers of that content, then there will be plenty of open source content and it shouldnt matter what the newspapers request for protection. The market will decide.

Newspapers are also catching flack for saying they dont want their content openly distributed. On this point, they are correct again. They should have complete control over where it is distributed. They should have the ability to choose where it is offered for free.

Not only should they have this control, taking back this control is the exact right business move. Im not saying it will save newspapers or magazines, it wont. But it will make their website offerings stronger in the long run. If Im them, I take the risk that the “printed” content business follows the path of the music industry.

In other words, you take on the role of identifying the best in breed for your business and use your resources to help those talented people figure out how to make money for themselves and for you.  You provide your resources and knowledge to make them smarter and then you go and compete against the masses.

In the long run, printed content producers should have a brand, and use their institutional knowledge, their core competencies and ability to procure, improve and market to maximize the value of their brands and the perceived value of their content. Whether its on a central website, a co produced website, in print or on a hologram in the evening sky, I should go to the NY Times because they have demonstrated to me that they have the very best articles on the subjects I am looking for. That they are the best source for breaking news about the topics I care about. THEY NEED TO MAKE SURE I DONT HAVE THE CHOICE OF GETTING IT ANYWHERE ELSE BUT WHERE THEY DICTATE.  If they cant make their content stand out from the open source masses and convince enough people to transact with them in  a way that makes them money they dont deserve to exist.

They should  distribute their content for Free where they believe it maximizes return, but should do everything possible to keep it from being distributed Freely.

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1. Has anyone noticed that its impossible to trust a single word uttered about coaching changes, the draft, trades and even celebration parties these days ?

Bloggers, sports websites and even the print media have gotten so desperate they seem to have come to the conclusion that fabricated stories, passed off as rumors, are a better way to drive traffic and create awareness of a website or blog than actual reporting.

Unfortunately, ESPN and local newspapers, radio and TV media have become the patsies of bloggers.  If some random blogger reports that “he has heard that a trade of Joe for John is being discussed”, then the traditional media, as they have told me many times “is requested by their editor to run it down and see if its real”.    Its almost like a sad joke.  How do you make an ESPN reporter jump ? Make up something and put it on your blog. Somewhere a bunch of sports bloggers are playing a drinking game.  Chug if the other guys made up trade rumor makes the ESPN crawl.

How to stop it ? ESPN.com puts up a page of blacklisted blogs and websites who’s posts they wont comment on or report on in any way.  It will create a short term surge of traffic for those sites, but then they will go away as the proprietors of the sites realize that being discredited is not a good thing.

2. I did a quick and dirty interview with The Motley Fool. They asked me about Buy and Hold for Stocks. My answer was simple.

“Buy and hold is long dead. It has always been a sucker’s bet.  Proponents point to charts of index performance over the long term; unfortunately, things like house repairs, kids, and college tuition don’t follow the same chart.

Buy and hold is a great marketing slogan for funds that want to take your money. Nothing more or less.”

Then they had John Bogle ,founder of Vanguard and creator of the Vanguard 500 comment on what I had to say.  I’m glad to say that Mr Bogle made my point.  In what should have been a simple answer for him, was not.  Plus he managed to take a  few shots at me.   Hey, if you can’t counter a point, slam the messenger ! Here is what he had to say.  Notice all the qualifiers.

“Cuban embargo … is what we need after those silly statements.

Of course buy and hold is a sucker’s bet where individual stocks are concerned (just ask the guys that bought and held Mark’s own company!)
And while buy and hold for all of American business (a stock index fund) may produce long years of plenty interrupted by years of famine, putting equity capital to work in that way will be great so long as America is great.
And as a group, all investors, by definition, are buy and hold investors! Not complicated! And mathematically, those who themselves are buy and holders (without costs) will — not might — outperform those who trade back and forth with one another, who capture the same market return but let all those croupier costs destroy their returns.

Finally, if buy and hold refers not to stocks or the stock portfolio but to one’s aggregate investment portfolio, reducing the stock commitment as age takes its toll, it is the most certain way to wealth that exists in our uncertain world.

He’s right about the marketing slogan — except when it is applied to the strategy described in the immediately preceding paragraph.”

I stand by what I had to say.  Buyer beware.

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This is the year of WTF. Yep, What the F&&&.

It doesn’t matter what got you to the point of saying it. Maybe you got fired/layed off. Maybe your company went out of business. Maybe you quit because you couldn’t take it any longer. Maybe you are just graduating from school and the prospects of living at home are far worse than cramming in with 12 roommates in a beater house or apartment you call “The Hotel”.  Whatever the reason, the question is how do you turn this time into the start of something good ?

I’m here to give you your WTF To Do List.

1. Recognize that its ok to live like a student.

It doesn’t matter where you live. It doesn’t matter how you live. It doesn’t matter what kind of car you drive. It doesn’t matter what kind of clothes you wear. It doesn’t matter.  Your biggest enemies are your bills.  The more you owe, the more you stress. The more you stress over bills, the more difficult it is to focus on your goals.  More importantly, if you set your monthly income requirements too high, you eliminate a significant number of opportunities. The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that.

2.  Take Lots of Chances

If you are living cheap, and ready to find out where your future lies, now is the time to try anything.  WTF time means fighting through your fears to take a job in a new industry. It means trying different things to find out what it is you love to do.  There will be no such thing as too many jobs.  In this type of economy getting a job is tough if not often impossible. So you are going to have bust ass to create opportunities for yourself.

Creating opportunities means looking where others are not.  Look outside where all your friends are looking.  Make a list of jobs and businesses that are outside the norm. I know you want to follow your passions and get a job in sports, movies, tv, shooting video for Girls Gone Wild,  and other things your friends would love. Why fight the crowds ?   Go where people are not. Just like you never thought you would ever fall in love with someone else, you will find another industry or job that you will love as much as your first love.  Move down your list to other things. Then get ready to work

In this kind of economy, it really is a numbers game. You are going to have to keep on applying for everything and anything that opens a door you want to walk through.  You can never slow down. Its hard work finding a job.  If you have bills you have to pay, and it means taking a night job in order to keep looking for the day job or to keep a job you want, do it.   Be a waiter, a night janitor, wash clothes, sell vacuum cleaners door to door,  whatever you need to do, all the while reminding yourself that it opens the door for your future.

Then when you do find a job, remind yourself again that  you are winging it.   Everyone always sees the bright side of the job they just took.  You have to.  The new job you just took that you thought would be amazing, will be amazing. Most probably it will be amazing for about 3 months. Then you will realize its not so  amazing and you will  need to find something else that is amazing. Thats ok. You don’t have to be right everytime. You just have to be right one time. Finding the right job is a lot like dating.  Its hard until you start, then when you start, its great till its not. Then its frustrating as hell until you get it right. But when you do, it all comes together.

3.  Figuring out if you are in the right job

Its really easy to know if you are in the right job.  If it matters how much you get paid, you are not in a job you really really love.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t want to make more money. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t bust your ass to make as much money as possible.  Thats not the issue. The issue is whether or not you truly love your job. If you love what you do so much that you are willing to continue to live like a student in order to be able to stay in the job, you have found your calling.

4. Figure out how to be the best

Once you have found out what you love to do, there is only one goal. How can you be the best in the world at it. It doesn’t matter if you are a filing clerk, an athlete, an accountant or a bartender.  All that matters is that you do whatever you can to be the best.  Of course “the best” is all relative.  The one person who you should never believe when it comes to evaluating your abilities is you. The very worst judge of your abilities is you. Self Evaluation is never successful.  When you are the best at something, the demand for your services will grow.  People want to hire the best. They want to be associated with the best. In 2009, in this economy so many people switch jobs and industries and its so much easier to stay connected via social networks and other digital means, people who need you can and will find you. So rather than trying to convince people you are the best, let the quality of your work do your talking.

5. Start the day motivated with a positive attitude.

You are going to screw up. We all do. I cant tell you how many times I did and do. It happens too often. No matter what happens, every morning, the minute after you wipe away the crust from your eyes, remind yourself that you are going to enjoy every minute of the day.  You are going to enjoy the 20 interviews you have. You are going to enjoy waiting in the heat for your roommate to  pick you up afterwards. You are going to enjoy realizing how frayed your collar is becoming and how sick you are of your one tie.  You are going to enjoy all the bullshit you have to deal with as you chase your goals and dreams because you want to remember them all. Each and every experience will serve as motivation and provide great memories when you finally make it all happen.

Its your choice. What are you going to do ?

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You have a video that you want to post on the web. It may be just for you. It could be for friends. It could be for family. It could be for a company or a political campaign. It could a video that you want seen by as many people as possible.  Regardless of your audience expectations, do you have any expectation of paying for that video to be hosted ?  Of course you don’t. Neither does anyone else.

The reality is that all of us have the expectation of being able to post any and every video on sites like Youtube for free, with no limitation on audience size or location.   We have reached the point where Youtube in particular, Google specifically is subsidizing the majority of user generated content on the web.  20gbs PER MINUTE upload and who knows how much for viewing

Which leads to the question, what happens if they stopped subsidizing the cost of bandwidth for user uploaded video ?

What would happen to internet video ? What would happen to social media ? What would happen to the future of entertainment ? What would happen to the future of politics ?  How would it change how we use the internet ? The list of questions is a mile long. Would it be the best thing to ever happen to traditional media ?  Hence the conundrum.

The next question of course is “why would Google stop subsidizing the uploading , hosting and presentation of 80pct of the user generated online videos (excluding commercial sites) viewed in the US  ?”

The answer of course is : Because they had to. 

There are two certainties for the technology business in the US.  The first is that every leader falls out of the lead at some point. The 2nd is that every leader falling out of the lead gets torched by Wall Street and places a premium on stock price over free services and their users. 

Google has already established itself as a hall of famer. But nothing lasts forever in techland. Particularly subsidies.  What happens to the internet and how we use it  when those subsidies end  is a country song that will eventually be written.

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In this day and age of blogs, aggregation sites, personal recommendation sites, link publishing, twitter and more, its not unusual to get a news alert email, or to wake up and google a person, place or thing and find hundreds of references originated in just the past 24 hours. Does it matter ? Could something be published hundreds, if not thousands of times on the net and be read by no one ? Fewer than 100 people ?  Fewer than 100 people that you care about ? The answer is yes.  

When should you care if something is published on the net about you, your company, or someone you care about ? The answer is not often, and only when it comes from a “professional outtie”

Whats an “Outtie” ? An Outtie is someone who publishes on the web.

There are two kinds of “Outties”. Those that attempt to publish in a limited number of locations to a maximum number of readers or listeners, with a reasonable expectation of building a following. They are the professional Outties.  

The 2nd type are the amateur outties. Those that attempt to publish in as many places as possible hoping they are “discovered”.  They publish in the comments section of a newspaper. They produce videos and response videos.  They comment on blogs. They may write a blog. They post comments on  facebook and myspace. They may tweet and  often reply to other people’s tweets.  They may call talk radio stations. They may send anonymous or even signed emails to people they don’t know. They forward emails.  They post comments on aggregation sites like Digg or Hacker News. Some use their writings to brand themselves. Others had behind anonymity and publish in volume to try to amplify a message.  Many engage in “sockpuppetry” and publish anonymously under any number of “handles” on blogs, forums, editorial boards, twitter and email.   Whereever there is a platform, the “Amateur Outties” wills will search it out and  write and speak on it.  Even worse, some will automate the entire thing and escalate the volume to enormous levels.

The “Innies” on the otherhand are passive consumers of web writings.  They are traditional media consumers,where the media, regardless of platform is coming one way to them. They only very rarely respond in public to the information they consume. They read , watch and listen to the Professional Outties. They ignore the amateur outties.

Why does this matter ? Because the Amateur Outties may be  creating  most of the volume for blogs, tweets, recommendation  and news sites on the internet.  

What got me thinking about this was after talking to some people  in the businessworld  that were getting upset about things that were being written about them. They were sending me links to blogs. They sent me a link to something posted on some newspaper sites.  They were sending me cut and pastes of tweets. They were sending me links to comments.  They were upset because in their mind they were under attack and an issue they were addressing had become “a huge media debacle”. 

I tried to explain to them that the “amateur outties” really had no impact on 99.99pct of the population.  That because its on the net, even if a newspaper puts it on their site, doesn’t mean more than 100 people had seen it or cared about what they read.  I had to repeat to them over and over, that even if something is tweeted and retweeted. If its published on 200 blogs. If its on some newspaper sites, it probably has no impact.

How could that be ?  The first step was to click through from tweets to the home pages of the tweeters and show them that most had under 20 followers and then show them that it looked like some of the followers linked back to accounts that looked like they were set up by the same person. In otherwords they were following and retweeting themselves to make it look like they were important. The same held true with blogs.  I would use some different webstats sites to show they werent in the top several hundred thousand websites and to notice that there were zero comments on the blog and no original sites linked to the blog. Then there were the newspaper sites. I couldnt show them the specific amount of traffic for a given article, but I could show the lack of a single comment . That for any articles for which there was probably more than a couple hundred readers , there would be at least a single comment.  If the  ”amateur outties”  didnt know or care about your issue, then the innies/the rest of the world, didnt either.

It soon became clear to them that vast majority of what is written on the web goes unread and even that which is read, is quickly forgotten.  That even when something is heavily commented on, it  is usually just an onslaught by the “amateur outties”.  

Fragmentation applies to 100pct of media. We have gotten to the point where it is so easy to publish to the web, that most of it is ignored. When it is not ignored and it garners attention, the attention is usually from those people, the amateur outties, whose only goal is to create volume on the web in hopes of being noticed. 

Thats not to say there are no sites that people consume and pay attention to. There obviously are.  Thats where the “professional outties” come in. They are branded. They have an identity that usually extends beyond the net.  They are able to make a living publishing, even if its not much of one.  They are the sites that people consume and may possibly remember.

The moral of the story is that on the internet, volume is not engagement .  Traffic is not reach.  When you see things written about a person, place or thing you care about,  whether its positive or negative, take a very deep breath before thinking that the story means anything to anyone but you.

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if you dont follow Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), you could not possibly understand how loyal and rabid fans of the sport are.  When people talk about fans that take supporting their favorites to extremes they usually use Nascar fans as examples.  Well write it down. MMA fans blow Nascar fans away. Thats not a knock on Nascar fans, its a tribute to MMA fans.

  Unlike the NBA, NHL and NFL,  the only athletes getting paid a lot of money to wear T Shirts are MMA fighters.There is a reason that fighters get paid a lot of money by sponsors to wear their apparel. It works.   Walk down any crowded street or through any mall and you are going to see guys wearing shirts and gear from TapOut, Affliction and others.  These are not discount brands. They are brands that MMA fans happily pay a premium for.

That loyalty extends far beyond clothing and fighters. We have been very fortunate at HDNet to experience that loyalty.  HDNet offers more live MMA events than every other network combined.  While everyone else wants to make you pay extra on PPV for their fights.  All of ours are free. And we continue to expand our offerings to feature the best fighters and fights from around the world. In all weight classes.  And we hope to have significant additions to our events roster to announce in the near future. 

Beyond live events, we have the only weekly news show dedicated to Mixed Martial Arts on television.  Our show, Inside MMA has been called the Sportscenter of MMA.  Featuring incomparable Bas Ruten and Kenny Rice, it brings the latest news and interviews and every week features a guest panel with the biggest names in the sport, Fedor, Couture, St. Pierre, Rashad Evans, Mayhem Miller  and many, many more.  

Combine that with ongoing original shows like the M-1 Challenge and the loyalty from our MMA viewers has been amazing.

Its obvious that some TV distributors don’t quite understand the size and loyalty of MMA fans, but I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to all HDNet subscribers and MMA fans who have gone above and beyond the call of duty in supporting our growth.  While we can’t win every battle, we continue our ascent having at least doubled our number of subscribers in every year of our existance with no signs of let up. In particular, I wanted to share an email that exemplifies many that I have received. I could not have said it any better

Mark,

I Want My MMA! 

I had to jump through a few hoops this week to get it.

 I’ve been a very disgruntled Time Warner Cable customer. I’ll spare you the laundry list of customer service issues I’ve suffered through. It turns out that none of the issues were a true deal breaker. Time Warner Cable’s legal notice earlier this week that HDNet would be dropped from their channel line-up at the end of this month was that deal breaker. I finally pulled the trigger. On Monday evening, I called Dish Network and scheduled an installation appointment. It took some convincing to get my landlord to sign off on the installation-agreement form. (You have to know my landlord to understand why that is easier said than done.) I got the form signed, and I successfully made the switch to satellite yesterday. Today, I’m visiting my local TWC office to drop off both of their lousy Motorola dvr set-top boxes. 

Dropping HDNet was Time Warner Cable’s last straw. I’m a huge MMA fan. If I’m going to pay a lot of money every month for television, the service provider must have HDNet. The first thing I do every Friday evening when I get home from a long week of work is tune in to Bas Rutten on Inside MMA. I pull all-nighters watching the live broadcasts of Dream and Sengoku from Japan. There is no way I’m going to miss the ‘roid raging freak Jose Canseco get his ass handed to him by a 7″ tall Korean freak show in the early morning hours of next Tuesday.

When asked why Time Warner Cable was dropping HDNet, Multichannel.com reported TWC director of corporate public relations executive Robyn Watson as stating “There’s limited appeal for the programming.”

I feel this statement is a bit shortsighted. HDNet broadcasts an extensive amount of the best non-UFC branded mixed martial arts programming. The sport is growing rapidly, and so is the audience. Do they understand that are dropping a revenue stream with excellent growth potential. Do the TWC executives not realize that even though HDNet doesn’t carry UFC programming, they will be losing subscribers like myself that spend upwards of $50 monthly on UFC pay-per-view events?

Mr. Cuban, I’m not writing just to kiss your ass. I do have a question for you.  Are you going to be able to close the deal when HDNet’s contract with Dish Network is up for renegotiation? I have no clue as to when your deal with Dish Network ends, and I signed a 2-year agreement as a new subscriber. Needlees to say, the early termination penalty is fairly stiff.

Thank you for your time,

Chris

My response: Dear Chris, we just signed an extension with Dish Network. So you are safe for  years to come. Enjoy our programming and make sure to tell your friends !

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