Rebuttal to MediaPost: Three rounds deep, $25million dollars in the hole, and projectile bleeding users every time you institute a new monetization strategy? Yep. You're going to have to dim your screen before your peers notice you noticing the handwriting on the wall.

I was there in the March1st complex in the late 90's. We were all about putting the brick and mortars out of business. And we were going to do it by giving everything away for free.

Short answer: We all agree to make all our sites PPL (pay per login) and charge all the self-entitled freeloaders (and the nice guys too) on Sept 15. It'll be so hot and muggy that day that everyone will be locked indoors - with no access to their favorite websites, unless they pay to play on that day. Om did it. So did BlogTalkRadio

Free phone calls, free movies, free mp3's, free business data, hell, even free medical diagnosis online. How were we planning to finance all this? Well, we all knew someone who had a lot of old money earned the hard way - in brick and mortars. And it was going to be their responsibility to recoup their money from the markets.

We were 20 something idealists. All we wanted to do was change the world. To do so, we were willing to bite the old-money-hand that was feeding us.

Yep, I even had "buddies" who'd seduce an investor's grand daughter just to keep the "flow" going.

I remember dot com parties where we'd rent out entire night clubs and floors of suites in the adjacent 4 star hotel just because we finished an incremental milestone (five months late). Oh, and since none of us were cool, we hired out the entire book of that one modeling agency that promised us a lot of "value."

Yep, I even had "buddies" who'd seduce an investor's grand daughter just to keep the "flow" going.

Seasoned, war-torn, and wiser, each of us are now the ceo's of our own websites. Having lost most of our idealism, dreams of instant oppulence, and our tollerance for PBR, now, we want to monetize.

Venture funding is like sex. I won't put out unless you can get some elsewhere

Now, we want to monetize.

Well, I must say, If we did anything correctly and impactually, we succeeded in creating a modern third millenium culture of freeloaders.

Ofcourse we succeeded, we were the best and the brightest from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, and beyond. But the truth is, while we blame the public for having a misplaced sense of entitlement, What we really SHOULD do is make the blame come full circle.

It was the sense of entitlement of the architects of the internets back in the mid 90's that has rippled throughout time and across into financial industries and even added to international distaste for America.

Ironically, taking full responsibility for our 20's arrogance is also the Panacea for monetizing our websites. What you SHOULD do with all that venture funding you got from the guy that plays golf all day long is treat it like a blood money loan. What you should do is personally take responsibility for paying it back. What you should do is treat IPO money as gravy money that will never get poured onto your meat and potatoes. What you should do is personally take responsibility for rewarding your investors' faith in you in spades. Yes, I still have "investors" I'm paying back. Slowly.

Now, how you SHOULD go about monetizing a website that projectile hemorrhages every time you institute a monetization scheme is simple. All of you, us, pick a date, say Sept 15, when it's so hot outside that everyone will be indoors. Everyone will be indoors, airconditioned, and online. We pick this moment in time to all unanimously go hard core porno. Yep. "No cash, no Casandra."

HBO went porno. WSJ is still porno. Harvard Business School Press has always been porno.

If you can't flip the bitch on Sept 15, 2009, it's simply because you don't believe your website is worth paying for. And you disgust me because you did think it is "good enough" to get funded. You thought it SHOULD be good enough to get funded by some old money person who has faith in you but isn't as savvy as the prime internet user demographic.

And to think that you criticized your free loving, bell bottom sporting, one time idealist hippy parents for selling out to corporate America?! I'm not even going to tell you what you SHOULD do.

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