Originally Posted by ozstamps
The present situation I feel sure is a huge profit centre for Randy way over and above whatever any actual costs are.
Not according to our host:
Originally Posted by Randy Peterson
actually to date - i'm still $300,000 in the hole on FlyerTalk. The marketing lady wanted to try something new and we'll take a look at it and see what it's all about. I think they asked me something earlier in the week but i was on a deadline and really wasn't paying attention. As well i was in ad-free mode on FT and might not noticed it anyway. But i'll take a look. As for making a chunk - if that was a goal, i'd have dumped FT a long time ago because it's been fairly expensive for me but the expense gap is closing.
We do hope to tweak this thing before the end of the year so we can hire a full-time community director so i can get back to my regular job.
As an update, there are maybe 35 members currently testing the FlyerTalk/Free option and we're almost ready for that to be available to you all. I never expect some of the members in OMNi to understand that sponsoring a Web site like FlyerTalk is very expensive to offer for free, but go out and think what 6 servers, two and a half full-time tech folks and 6 mbps of bandwidth can do to your wallet. All that so i can see someone pummel another member about Karl Rove? Pretty expensive entertainment.....
While I understand the need for revenue generation to support FT and sure would not have gone this far, I take Randy at his word that the marketing folks may have gone a bit nuts without his personal oversight every step of the way.