While hundreds of companies put their presence up on the World Wide Web every day, few have figured out how to get people to electronically visit their site and get their message accross.
Now that we have operated the Chat Forums for several months, know that the software is robust and have an idea of our traffic, we are seeking one or more major international corporate sponsors who could most benefit from the kind of repeated exposure to corporate identity that the Chat Forums provide.
The Columbus Home PageŽ Chat Forums on the World Wide Web generate more than 1.6-million accesses, "hits" or visits per month--the terms are somewhat interchangeable. This does not mean we are counting individual visitors since in a chat server forum, the site is accessed over and over again to post new messages and get a page of responses. Over a two-week period, those accesses come from more than 15,000 separate machines in more than a dozen countries. A single machine sometimes represents several individuals when their method of access is through a text-based browser such as Lynx--a scheme often used by local "freenets". Most of the participants are between 15 and 30 years old and a large number are college students.
Each one of these "hits" currently includes at the top of each new page of incoming responses, an advertiser's graphic or logo, a short paragraph and a link to an existing World Wide Web page at the advertisers site or to completely new site which we can design, costruct and install on our server.
The rate for exclusive sponsorship of the Chat Forums is one-half cent per access, "hit," or new page of responses sent to an individual--about $8,000 a month at current levels. Rates for partial sponsorship will be higher. This compares with the Lycos Directory of the Web rates of 1.8 cents per access for sponsorship of a minimum of 1,000,000 accessess. Simply, The Columbus Home Page® Chat Forums allow an advertiser to reach a more demographically concentrated audience of active buyers at lower expense then most other venues.
Custom HTML, graphics, copywriting, design and strategic consulting are billed at $50 to $100 an hour.
The Columbus Home PageŽ Chat Forums are hosted on our own Pentium-based server running Solaris and connected to the Internet with a high-speed T1 connection.
