NJHUNTER-L Archives

From: Al Sinclair <>
Subject: [NJHUNTER-L] New Jersey Hunterdon County Mail List
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 22:05:15 -0400

Hi,

You are subscribed to the Hunterdon County, New Jersey mail list. I
hope you find this a useful way to discuss our ancestors in Hunterdon
County.

However, did you ever stop to think about who pays for this service.
NJHUNTER is hosted by Rootsweb, a cooperative dedicated to making free
resources available on the internet for genealogist. Rootsweb depends
on donations for most of its support.

An article by one of the people who keep Rootsweb alive is enclosed.
The work that these volunteers do it absolutely tremendous. I hope you
will read this and consider making a contribution to Rootsweb so that
our mail list and all the other great facilities at Rootsweb can
continue.

Thanks,

Al
List Owner.

- ---------------------------------------------------------------

WHO PAYS FOR ROOTSWEB? Responding to last week's announcement
that RootsWeb will be launching new hobby communities, a reader
wrote:

As a contributor, I vote NO to using time and money
and hard disk space for hobbies, pets, cooking, and the
like. Folks that want to indulge their hobbies can PAY.

The new communities will pay their own way. In fact, they will be
supporting the genealogical community, rather than the other way
around, as the writer of the above feared.

Here is the problem, and why the new communities will be the
solution.

When we launched RootsWeb, we assumed that our users would prefer
to support us as much as they were able, in exchange for a site
open to all, without banners plastered all over everything and
without having resources locked up (as is done at other genealogy
sites), available only for fees on the order of $60 per year.
Instead, people can support RootsWeb for as little as $12 per
year. We thus hoped that a reasonable fraction of our users,
perhaps half of them, would support us in some way. And because
we expected support from the community, we made promises to
projects like USGenWeb that we would freely host them for the
good of the Internet genealogy community.

We have no intention of reneging on those early promises, but it
has been difficult, because the community support we anticipated
has not been there. Although people use the site like crazy,
fewer than 7% of our users have chipped in to keep things going.
The other 93%? Perhaps they're busy, or they're broke, or they
won't pay unless they have to, or they don't think RootsWeb is
useful. Who knows? But it means that RootsWeb has run at a cash
flow loss. In simple terms, Karen Isaacson and Brian Leverich
have donated not only their time as system administrators but a
substantial part of their personal resources to provide the
genealogical community with RootsWeb. The rest of RootsWeb's
staff have also made substantial contributions.

Because RootsWeb's costs exceed its income, we can't provide all
the genealogical facilities we'd like to support. These could
include online searchable databases of pension records, census
indexes, vital records, or countless other valuable genealogical
services that we could easily provide -- if only we could afford
the staff to support them. And, ultimately, RootsWeb can't even
continue to exist if we don't bring our costs and revenues into
balance, something we want to have under control before the
transition to non-profit status (as opposed to losing money
status) is completed.

We are doing what we can to remedy the situation. For instance,
we are selling banner advertisements where we can. However, this
alone will never provide enough revenue to cover the costs of the
unbannered volunteer projects which consume most of RootsWeb's
resources yet by their very nature produce no direct revenue,
even as they provide invaluable content to the genealogical
community.

The new communities, from their inception, will be fully
supported by advertising. They will be paying their own way. We
can shift some of the costs of maintaining the Web, mailing list,
GenConnect, and search engine servers onto the new communities,
so that the new communities will subsidize a genealogical
community that hasn't been supporting itself.

Although we have been disappointed in the amount of financial
support of the genealogical community, we would like to express
our deep gratitude to the writer of the letter above and the
other 7% of our users who have helped make RootsWeb available to
the whole community. Without their support and encouragement,
there would be no RootsWeb.

If you would like to join the folks who are making RootsWeb
possible and thus help us bring new genealogical data
online, freely available to all, please visit:
<http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html>;
or send e-mail to:

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• [NJHUNTER-L] New Jersey Hunterdon County Mail List by Al Sinclair <>