Another commercial avenue one could explore is no doubt with the fast-growing on-line booksellers. Our site is as much bibliography as it is anything else. No doubt a quite a few books are carried by folks such as amazon.com and some of the German on-line booksellers. If our site is willing to point to theirs as sources of these books, they should be willing compensate in return. At 12:23 PM 10/1/98 -0400, W. Fred Rump wrote:

On 1 Oct 98, at 7:44, Arthur Teschler wrote about [webpages-l] www.genealogy.com - German Genealogy:

...

Was machen wir damit?

Hello. My name is Charles Merrin, and I am the Director of Marketing for a web site called Family Tree Maker Online at www.familytreemaker.com.

I am interested in exploring ways we might be able to work together to promote genealogy. These ideas might include sponsorship, exchanging data, co-promotion, and some others. If you are interested in talking, you can reach me at 510-494-2783 or charles_merrin@broder.com. Of if you prefer, send me your phone number and I will call you. In any case, I look forward to talking with you soon.

Re: unsere Diskussion wegen fund raising und vereinsbildung etc

As I and others have mentioned previously, our site is attracting attention around the world. The number of hits alone say something.

FTM has huge resources committed to their web presence and their freely available 171 million name index is just a start to a growing genealogical database. Everything is obviously geared toward profit one the one hand and getting ever larger masses of people on the other to access their site. Numbers of hits count as far as revenue goes. Surely they are also interested in the future possibilities of German users accessing the net and finding their site and products.

I think one of us should write to this fellow and explore what possibilities might exist in more detail. We are not a commercial site. They are. We may include links and references to FTM for a fee which might be in the form of a monthly or annual donation.

In effect they would act as one of our sponsors and fall into the contribution concept I outlined in one of my previous mails to genstaff-l. Realistically we need to understand that funding drives the world and we can't continue to do this as we have in the past.

Sorry for the English. It goes twice as fast.

Fred

PS My suggestion would be for Jim to write to him as he has a measure of status with the PhD and posting from MIT. That counts here too. :-)

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