OH-FOOTSTEPS-L Archives

Archiver > OH-FOOTSTEPS > 1999-05 > 0926053152


From: Maggie Stewart-Zimmerman <>
Subject: Fw: RootsWeb Concern
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 00:59:12 -0400


- ----------------------------------------------------------------
FORWARDED MESSAGE
Subject: Re: [OHIO] RootsWeb Concern
- ----------------------------------------------------------------
Saw this on the [OHIO], thought it worth repeating.

Hello,
In the exceprt below, Rootsweb is responding to questions about
commercial partnerships, while retaining non-profit status. I think it
is very important that more users contribute. I urge everyone to read this
excerpt and contribute what they can. If 93 per cent of the people who use the resources are not contributors, we are depending on a small group of
people to maintain the genealogical community spirit and that is pretty
unrealistic.

In fact, if you save one trip to an archive, I suspect that that is
worth a contribution. If you have found resources through a rootsweb
mail list that may also be well worth a contribution. And then there
are all those great resources for your next puzzle and magical mystery tour
...

The people who have created rootsweb are pretty phenomenal in their commitment and excel in skills that make rootsweb one of the best
managed sites on the internet. While rootsweb is very near the top of the
high traffic sites, it is one of the most reliable.

Think about what you can do and it will not only be greatly
appreciated, but give a resounding cheer for the vision and perserverance of the rootsweb staff.

Thanks for any help you can offer,
Sharon

* * *

"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:


* * *

This thread: