POW fic stats

[feng_shui_house]

5080 non-adult stories, down from 5,104 yesterday. All stories total (including 'M' rated) is now 5612 down from 5,646. (Stats from this morning, when I first tried to post. LJ isn't letting me post today- a lot of other people are complaining- one said extremely short posts were possible, so this is a test.)

Comments

I can't do a long comment, either.

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

I hope people who signed up just to 'save' their pen-names will also start turning in their memberships. I have a feeling *any* high numbers on the site can be used to gain revenue/attract investors. (Look, we have over 2,000 members, so they don't all write, they come here and read the ads!)

Ficlets May 22 talks about Pit of Weasels.com in a 'just noticed it' way. (Evidence that they're getting attention beyond the corporate/fanfic worlds) http://ficlets.com/blog/entry/corporatized_fan_fiction

This is lovely. A lot of good business advice that POW would never take (written by someone in a similar business)
http://www.girl-wonder.org/designatedsidekick/2007/05/20/hey-fanlib-an-open-letter-from-a-marketer-watching-yet-another-fan-connected-company-self-harm/


And I love this. Mimbo (Chris Williams) is one of the chief Weasels. He's been signed up at this site for 7 months, and still has NO friends. *grin* There's also a user profile giving his age as 35 Light Years. I wonder if that was his wording, or the site's? I suspect Mimbo liked Star Trek as a kid and figures that gives him insight into fandom. http://www.mania.com/mimbo/friends/

Let's see if it can do this much.

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

This page from Business week has a quote I love. "The genius of Pit of Weasels is realizing that fans can be happy just being recognized. " http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_11/b3975037.htm

Well that explains why we should be grateful POW is going public and requiring submitters to not only accept all the risk, but actually makes it *riskier* (In my non-lawyer opinion) by including in their TOS a part where submitters swear that they have the legal right to the copyrighted stuff they base their fic on. Can you see going into court and having that waved under your nose? POW aims at total and complete safety for themselves- at the fanficcers expense. Boy, what we'll do for 'recognition'. And t-shirts. Don't forget the t-shirts. We really need a t-shirt for our folks. Maybe someone with a cafepress or zazzle shop can put up a design- I suggest a line drawing of weasels and the caption 'I escaped the Pit of Weasels'.

Interesting points are being made in this journal.
http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/263549.html

I'll mention just a few from liz-marcs journal that particularly caught my eye.

One of the POW founders is associated with SixApart which now owns LJ. (On the Other Hand, someone who says he's the longest time full time employee of LJ (not counting Brad) had put up a post outlining various things to be wary of in the POW TOS (and he didn't sound thrilled about the rest of the site).

Also, links to POW help them because they earn ad revenue based on page hits, so I'll not put any more up and have removed all links to their site that I mentioned in previous posts & replaced FL with POW or Pit of Weasels.

Also, why do you have to hunt past a lot of glowing business stories aboutFanLib on google before you get to any of the gazillion critical webpages (which probably have more links and should be higher rated)? Hmm... can you pay google to give priority to certain pages when you're searched? MMm... maybe it just takes google a while to find pages, and they'd done these press releases months ago. Nearly all the business stories have huge word-for-word chunks of identical praise (no doubt written by POW themselves.)