Sponsor's Message

We're told that by putting up your own website, you can deliver whatever message you choose to a potential audience numbered in hundreds of millions of people.

Well I'm afraid that things have changed a little.

I'm not talking about censorship, I'm talking about cost.

Surprisingly, the biggest threat to free speech on the Web may well be the popularity of the Net itself.

To elaborate a little further...

In around two months time I'll be launching a new website that I expect to attract tens of millions of unique visitors in its first week or two of operation.

Obviously, with those traffic figures, most of these visitors will be from outside New Zealand and this wave of eyeballs will likely be driven by mainstream media coverage.

The site itself will contain about 10-15 pages of HTML with a total of maybe 5MB of graphics and images. The killer however, will probably be as much as 50MB of video footage available for download.

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It's easy to see that such a site will chew through an astonishing amount of bandwidth. Do the sums for yourself -- even if it gets just 5 million visitors, each viewing or downloading an average of just 1MB of data each, that's 5,000 GB of traffic!

At the going rate of US$12/GB for bulk data transfer, this represents a figure of at least US$60,000 in excess traffic charges.

Of course I could offset some of these costs by selling advertising space on the site's pages -- surely there'd be plenty of companies lining up to get their message in front of so many eager eyes?

Well maybe so -- but for a site with a very short-term lifespan such as the one I'm proposing (particularly when there's only a very limited amount of lead-time) actually selling the space is not a simple task.

And would the advertising revenues even cover the cost of the bandwidth? Perhaps not.

With online advertising rates still near their all-time lows, and much of the anticipated traffic volume linked to the download of large video files, how can a few banners hope to pay the bills?

I'm still scratching my head over this one but so far I've come up with a few possible solutions:

• encourage other site operators to mirror the content on their own servers.
• charge a subscription for access to the video files
• try to strike a sponsorship deal with a major hosting company who can use it as a demonstration of their capabilities.

However, no matter how you look at it I think it must be acknowledged that it doesn't take too much for a popular website to become a victim of its own success. Even Aardvark is really starting to burn the bandwidth and during the past 30 days it's served up nearly 14GB of data to visitors (albeit some of this relates to my jet-engine activities).

Without the support of sponsors and the generous donations of readers, Aardvark would be a real burden on my own finances because it's simply become too successful. So it seems that the Net is still a great place for free speech, just so long as you don't plan on too many people listening.

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