Originally Posted by Markul

I started out in this industry using zippedsites, I also had hundreds of blogs with thumblogger. So I know the pain when services close. But I also saw a market that was underdeveloped and while my first shot at this was far from perfect, it did confirm my thesis that it was a viable place to allocate resources and that the project had a future.

The original plan was to refer webmasters to sponsors and skim a % of traffic. That plan has changed. Especially since we are seeing the big G. blanket remove sites that skim traffic. And skimming is bad for a couple of other reasons:

*It's hard to convert skimmed traffic (but you can sell it, for very little).
*It's an extremely bad experience for the surfer to just be blind redirected.

So we won't be doing that. But we do reserve the right to, if shit really hits the fan down the road. It's all in the terms. But we really don't want to do that for the reasons I listed. And we won't have to, because we have 3 revenue streams:

The first is referring webmasters to sponsor programs
This is done via the sponsor module that will be launched with the tube sites and further built on with the next two site types released after tubes. People don't have to use our referral link, but since it won't cost them anything we hope they do (and they do).

Second stream is referring webmasters to advertisers
Right now we have PlugRush integrated and we plan to have more, so people can choose or use them all in rotation. Again we are seeing good numbers on webmasters signing up via our link.

The final stream are Premium Accounts.
For a small monthly fee, you can pay to unlock site customization - now this won't be available until we've implemented the tube system and possibly not until we are done with all 4 site types. At this point I have not decided when we want to open up for this.

A Premium Account unlocks the ad-zones so you don't have to use the advertisers we have integrated, it also unlocks the ability to edit the stylesheets of the sites and will put you on top in the support queue. Later down the road we'll have more features built in that I don't want to talk about right now, but Premium Users will have a little extra that makes it worth it.

So the model for easyXsites is a freemium business model. Simple as that. A freemium business model requires the right balance and I am confident that we can and will have that right mix (I have a mainstream background in both web-based freemium computer games and business consulting, so it's not like I just read something fancy on a wikipedia page)

I hope this answers your question XSAXS