Is DD Broke? Is DD 'going under'?

No.

Thats the simple answer.

I refer to this entry

I feel like Gerald Ratner! Heh. With a difference that we don’t have a shareprice to uphold.

My comment that DD is broke was a tongue in cheek reference, albeit true. But the point I neglected to tell anyone is that DD has ALWAYS been broke. It probably always WILL be.

Banners, subscriptions and such like are here in order to help us (Matt and Steve) pay for the site. But at the end of the day, the site will be here regardless. That doesn’t mean we’ll keep ploughing more money and more money and expanding and such like if there’s nothing coming in. Clearly that would make no sense. But, DearDiary, OpenFiction and ALL AtomIC Systems sites are PRIVATELY FUNDED.

There are no Venture Capitalists (we don’t WANT them!). There are no debts. There is no huge cash burn.

We run a server, based in the US. It costs us $610 a month for this server, and provided we don’t use more bandwidth than our allowance, thats the price we pay, each month. Thats it. Thats all.

We don’t pay ourselves a salary. Why? Because this is a spare time project. We do it because we enjoy it. (Yeah, we’re crazy). Both Matt and I make pretty decent money as independant consultants for major (ie, non dotcom!) companies. If you really want to know I’ll tell you how much I make. But you’ll have to ask 🙂

To put it plainly, we don’t NEED anyone’s money. But we’d like to think that the people who use the site will help us pay for it. And indeed later on help us to move into working full time for AtomIC Systems. But the latter will not happen until there is a good solid base and a steady income stream. Thats a long long way off. The online world needs to settle down a lot before that can happen!

But thats a big big world away from ‘DD.Net is going under’ as I seem to have implied in one of my last entries.

And since we don’t have shareholders or a stockmarket, or investors to please, rumours such as these don’t really affect us. Feel free to mail and ask questions if you desire, we’ll answer.