(soapbox on) Some of our readers have discovered that there are ads in TNPC. And it's true! Yes, friends, I'm here to tell you that we got ads! Right here in River City! With a capital... Sorry, I watched the Music Man on DVD last weekend. Anyway, we got trouble because these ads are, well, ads. And we've been told that if we run an ad in our free newsletter we had durn well better be careful because we're endorsing that advertiser. Ha! The only endorsement we make for paid advertisers in TNCP is that their checks are good. Okay, we do make a fair attempt to determine if the product they're selling is illegal or immoral and if we think they qualify on either count we don't run the ad. Otherwise if they can get the samolians up on the virtual counter, they're in.
Along the same vein I was accused by one TNPCer of being two- faced (and other less charitable designations) because my article on privacy in the last issue appeared in the same issue as a classified ad for Net Detective, a product that purports to help you find out anything about anybody. Excuse me, two-faced? Our writers, myself included, are fairly free to spout off about most any subject they care to but not an erg of energy is spent trying to coordinate stories with advertising. It is to laugh. Funnier still is thinking Net Detective is a threat to anyone's privacy. It simply provides an interface to get at the publicly available information that's already out there. I recently needed to find someone mentioned in a deed of trust that I had inherited and Net Detective was very useful in tracking down the descendants of the person I was looking for so I could clear up some title issues. So putting aside the interesting dichotomy of an article on privacy and an ad for Net Detective -- news flash -- we do realize that there are ads in our newsletter.
Advertising consumes perhaps 50 of the 800 or so lines of text that make up each free issue of this newsletter. Remember, while TNPC is entirely free to you, it is not free for us to produce. Ad revenue offsets just a fraction of the costs we incur publishing TNPC. We clearly mark the ads so you can see them for what they are; you can read them or skip them at your discretion. If you have suggestions as to how we can drop the advertising and still cover our publication and marketing costs, we'd love to hear them. If you have an idea about how we could continue cranking out TNPC and actually make some bucks to help feed our 15 collective kids (counting mine, Lee's, and Dan's) we'd love to hear that too. And if you're a venture capitalist with millions burning a hole in your pocket please call us toll free at... sorry these fits of silliness just overtake me.
Besides which, some of our advertisers have been with us a long time and provide products and services we have used personally. They have helped keep the newsletter free for all of you.
Since we have to go through this explanation on advertising and trying to turn a dollar with TNPC every so often, there is now a page on our Web site that explains in detail all the money- grubbing things we do via TNPC to try and make a buck:
http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/313/tr.cgi?disclose(soapbox off)
