 |
| Brett Favre: Calling an audible against NFL owners |
Take a deep breath, suspend all disbelief and walk through the following hypothetical (and admittedly ridiculous) scenario with me ...
It's December 2006.
I decide to leave ESPN, start my own blog and charge $10 per year for anyone to read my column. Just for fun -- again, it's hypothetical! -- let's say one million readers sign up, guaranteeing me $10 million for that first year (2007). And let's say I sign advertising deals with three sponsors for another $2 million apiece, raising my total haul to $16 million for Year 1. I spend the next 12 months writing and pinching myself for my good fortune. Life is good.
Fast-forward to December 2007. I just learned something about myself. I don't like it. I know it's wrong. I can't shake it. I can't deny it. See, I really, really like money. Even if I never imagined making $16 million in my lifetime, much less for a single year, I now find myself smitten by those dollar signs. How much more can I make? How high can this go? Someday, I want my financial adviser to cackle and say, "Good Lord, I don't even know what to do with all this cash flow." That's what I want.
Hence, I need to raise the total value of my "franchise." I build a more sophisticated website, pay for designers and extra bandwidth, then hire a team of writers and editors to work for me. That creates $2 million in expenses for Year 2, which I pay off by finding a fourth sponsor. In order to cover these additional expenses, I'm "forced" to raise the 2008 subscription fee to $25. (That's what I tell my idiot readers.) This time around, only 700,000 readers sign up. Between sponsors and subscribers, I am still guaranteed a total haul of $23.5 million for Year 2. Profit. This is good. I am showing "growth." Even as I slowly antagonize my audience.
By the end of Year 2, I have the hottest sports website on the Internet. Everyone wants to work for me for the visibility and prestige, and also because I share revenue with employees (they get salaries plus a small piece of everything I am pulling in). An overload of potential sponsors allows me to jack my rates and pocket $30 million in ad revenue for Year 3. But you know what? I love the smell of money. I can't get enough of it. Sometimes I go to the bank, withdraw a wad of $100 bills, throw it on my desk, lean my face over it and smell the pile like cookies baking in an oven. I can't get enough. I am insatiable. I need more.
For Year 3, I limit subscriptions to 300,000, then sell "personal subscription licenses." For an upfront fee of $200, a reader would purchase the right to subscribe for 10 years -- a decade-long contract of sorts -- at whatever price I charge. Did you catch those last five words? At whatever price I charge. How stupid are these people? Yeah, I know, they are my fans ... but don't they realize that I'm throwing on a ski mask and holding them up? And so what if this makes me the greediest, most soulless a-hole who ever lived? I WANT THAT MONEY! This is America! Greed is good! I have lost my mind.
Incredibly, I sell those 300,000 PSLs for a total haul of $60 million, then make another 50,000 PSL-free subscriptions available on a first-come/first-serve annual basis. (Those sell, too.) Was that influx of money worth getting ripped by media reporters and savaged on message boards and blogs? Are you kidding? Please. Throw in another $12.25 million from the $35 subscription fee for Year 3 (which, very quietly, I jacked up another 10 bucks) and a robust $20 million in ad revenue and, even after you remove expenses and revenue sharing, I still pocket $80 million.
Now I'm on the cover of Business Week, I'm featured in Vanity Fair, I'm making appearances on Bill Maher and "The Daily Show." ... I'm a rock star, the writer/entrepreneur who turned his little blog into a nine-figure operation. I spend another $5 million on staff, then another $10 million on a five-story building on Hollywood Boulevard, then another $10 million renovating it into a state-of-the-art office that features a lavish two-story sports bar with a 250-inch Panasonic HD plasma that costs $400,000 (the first of its kind) ... which, by the way, I didn't have to pay for because I convinced the city of Los Angeles to fund almost all of it with taxpayer money. I will generate revenue from journalism buffs, tourists, you name it. Or so I think.
See, I may have bitten off a little bit more than I could chew this time.
read more:
