WebStart Confederation Technical Details

Some Confederation Technical Details

Each confederation is unique. On this page we describe some high level technical aspects of a confederation to help candidates evaluate the costs and benefits of confederating with Webstart. Promising confederation candidates are content developers who already support Web page sets with a project or personal interest focus. At some point such page sets can reach a level of development and readership where they need an independent source of support. We generally find that a readership of from 300 to 800 page views (not "hits") per day is adequate to begin considering advertising. Page sets that receive over 1000 page views a day are quite promising and should be seriously considered for advertising development.

Candidate page sets may have been developed in an academic setting where no financial support was provided. They may have been developed in a commercial setting where a project supported them initially, but they have grown to the point where they need an independent source of support - and the business involved does not deal with such support through advertising revenue. Regardless of the exact situation, the common factor is a developing reader base and inadequate financial support.

In such a case Webstart can help get the page set started with Web advertising support. We enumerate below example steps in commercializing a set of Web pages with Webstart confederation (starting in step 2). Note that the steps and specific form below are just an example. There are many forms of confederation possible and with the technology of the Internet/Web changing as rapidly as they are it is quite possible that a given confederation would take quite a different form. The key factor is sharing sponsors and advertising infrastructure and revenue, but the steps below can give an indication of the sort of confederation possible.

Clearing intellectual property encumbrances: Web page sets are often initially developed in an academic or business setting where there may be an intellectual property claim to the content. This claim must be cleared before commercialization can begin. Typically the academic situation is not a problem. Even in a business setting Web page support is often considered an unwanted cost. Most businesses do not have the infrastructure to support Web page sets through advertising. The most common difficulty in clearing intellectual property encumbrances result when an institution considers a Web page set to have direct advertising value. In this case commercialization may not be possible - in some sense the page set is already commercialized. In most cases when a Web page set was started without a specific commercial focus, intellectual property rights are not a problem.
Initial contact with Webstart: If you support a page set that you believe to be a promising cantidate for commercialization and you have cleared any intellectual property encumberances, it is a good time to contact Webstart Communications by sending a message to confederation@webstart.com to discuss the possibilities for commercialization. You will need to have page view statistics whether collected through one of the popular page counter CGIs or through an access_log analysis. We will consult with you about the page set, look at your pages, and help you to determine whether commercialization makes sense. There are no commitments during this discussion.
Mobility and the initial commitment: If the contact and subsequent discussion suggests that a page set has commercial promise, the next step is to make it mobile. We feel strongly that any page set with commercial potential needs to be mobile. There are two current technical approaches for achieving mobility. One approach is to indirect references through an indirection provider. We do not recommend this approach. Such providers generally cause geographical inflexibility, performance problems and possible reliability problems (both short term due to outages and long term due to going out of business). The approach we recommend at present is to obtain a DNS (Domain Name Service) name for the page set.
Obtaining a DNS name currently costs $150. $100 of this goes to the Network Information Center for their well known and controversial fee. The remaining $50 goes to Webstart for setting up the DNS hosting. If you already have a DNS name you save $100. At present it is possible to avoid any recurring costs for a DNS name except the $50/year that the NIC requires. This DNS name (e.g. www.myset.com) becomes your property. At Webstart we believe it is important to provide you as a content developer with the freedom to move your content with your DNS name to any host of your choosing and to sever your relationship with Webstart. We exchange a 6 month initial commitment and a 3 month notice of intent to dissolve our relationship (from either side). At present (and hopefully always) we do not use contracts to insure this commitment. We work entirely with e-mail and/or verbal commitments. The $150 cost for your DNS name is your only out of pocket expense for confederating with Webstart (beyond your computer and Internet access). From that point on any financial transactions will be advertising revenue transferred to you from Webstart.
Hosting and access: Webstart provides hosting including disk space and Internet access for your Web pages at our site. We provide you with a directory for your Web pages, an ftp drop directory for you to send in updates, and a Web interface to run a script to update your page set from what is in the drop directory. You are required to have access to the Internet and of course your own computer on which to maintain your Web page content. We are fairly flexible about the details of hosting and access and are willing to discuss alternatives. If you do not already have a DNS name, then when your pages are initially rehosted to their new DNS name we expect you to provide support for redirection to the new site from your old site (this should be in your interest and that of your previous presence provider). Any incremental costs of hosting (e.g. disk space or virtual hosting or SSL support if desired) and access (traffic charges) are deducted from advertising revenue before it is split. If there is inadequate advertising revenue in any given time period to cover hosting and access, Webstart makes up the difference. It is partially for this reason that we must be careful in selecting page sets for commercialization.
Advertising: We currently use Server Side Includes (SSIs) to access the policy routines that select our advertisers, provide the HTML needed for their message, and log their page views and ultimately click throughs. We will work with you to define the environment for advertising in your page set. Generally this will mean that all you have to do to link in the advertising is to add a single line that we will give you, something like:

to each of your web pages. This should be a one time modification. The SSI interface will supply this ad.pl module with enough information to determine where the ad is being placed (namely into your page) and the other information it needs to make an ad selection and to do appropriate logging (e.g. to log a credit to you for a page view). Webstart will provide all needed support for placing advertising through these modules. There are additional details involved in placing map ads and/or search pattern specific ads.
Finances: We are currently charging one cent per page view for background (i.e. relatively unfocused) banner views - slightly more (up to five cents per view) for focused ads. We urge you to weigh these numbers when considering commercializing your Web pages. An example page set delivering 500 page views/day will be bringing in $5/day when they are delivering background banner advertising. Additional revenue can be generated by additional page views and/or additional focus. This is not a business in which you are likely to make a quick fortune. On the other hand if you already have your computer equipment and are paying for Internet access, this is an easy way to start producing income from your Web page support. There is growth potential with large numbers of page views.
Our current policy is to split advertising revenue evenly with our confederated content developers after deducting charges for disk space, Internet traffic from our presence provider. You pay for your own computer system and Internet access and for your Domain Name. After the initial six months we are each free to renegotiate or sever the relationship with a 3 month notice. We deal with the sponsors (though you are free to solicit them) and pay you from the advertising revenue. Cross advertising with other Webstart confederaed page sets is handled without cash exchange. Cross posted advertising page views are credited or debited according to whether a page view is supplied or used.

This program may not be exactly a free lunch, but we expect it is about as close to one as you are likely to find. If you have a page set that you believe is a promising candidate for commercialization, we urge you to address its intellectual property issues and then contact us. Please send your initial correspondence to: confederation@webstart.com. Describe your situation, let us know how many page views your page set is currently delivering and send us a URL so that we can evaluate its potential.

Webstart Communications
2835 Benvenue Avenue
Berkeley, California
94705-2103

(510) 548-4590