Every ezine I read these days, including all of my own,
editors are having to waste valuable space reiterating rules or tightening them up because of variety of abuses that they suffer from unscrupulous subscribers. Listen up, because even if you are only guilty by association, you are contributing to death of your own business online.It's not a few who are too selfish to read rules, it's a daily deluge. It aught to be punishable as theft. It's so prolific, so large-scale it amounts to Grand Theft.
I reckon an editor's time is worth same as next person's and I presume that those of you who still go out to do a 9-5 don't say "Oh, that's OK, don't bother to pay me." at end of week or month. Do you refuse all money in return for your online efforts? Not bloody likely!
OK, so why then are ezine editors different?
What do we get in return for our time? That's many hours spent handling all list admin tasks that are necessary, keeping up with our subject matter, doing research, writing stuff, dealing with correspondence, scheduling ads, formatting it, making sure it has value to readers, sending it out on time ...
Yeah, we might get a few bucks worth of ad revenue, but don't ask me to work out hourly rate, my calculator doesn't have that many decimal places!
No, we get bombarded with autoresponders, counter offers and "vacation" replies, we get false email addresses that bounce on us, we get free email addresses that are over limits and bounce on us, we get spammed to death to our email addresses because some idiots think that a subscription to our ezine constitutes a "business relationship", moaners and whiners who don't like rules and cant follow them ...
All of this clogs up our email accounts, has to be dealt with and ROBS us of our valuable time. Felony, theft, plain and simple.
Oh, that's on top of genuine feedback from actual humans that are subscribed -- only sort of mail we do want, thank you.
There are also a breed of sub-humans who conveniently forget that they subscribed and accuse us of SPAM, which mean we have to spend half a day or more trying to clear our name. If an ezine requires that you subscribe to it, believe me it is NEVER spam.
I know who these characters are: they are same sort that resort to road rage, psychologically immature that just have to find someone to blame -- for everything. They look to make trouble: like all perversions, they get kicks from it.
