E-Mail Maintenance

At the top left of every Section of the Website will be a box for your e-mail address. If you were on the previous Newsletter list, you should now be on this one. If you are not, you can add your e-mail to the list to subscribe directly from the Website or from the newsletter which will also have an entry box.

In fact, at the bottom of every newsletter will be two choices, one to “Unsubscribe” by clicking a link and sending e-mail back, and one to “Subscribe” by clicking a different link.

A few notes about E-Mail Maintenance. You can update your own e-mail information via the Website directly. Enter your e-mail address and you will go to a screen that shows which newsletters you are subscribed to and there will be a place for you to substitute a new address if you change. Please take advantage of this as requests via e-mail may or may not be immediately entered into the e-mail distribution database.

There is also a place in E-Mail Maintenance that if you scroll down far enough to the last section, we’d like to collect a bit of demographic information from you. We don’t care to collect your name or anything like that. But, since we intend to offer this Website at no charge to the reader, we wish to offer our readership to advertisers, and the best way to do that is to find out who our readers are.

There are 4 simple questions that we greatly desire collecting information on: 1) Gender, 2) ZIP Code, 3) State, and 4) Age Group. You will see that Gender and Age Group have drop-down boxes for you to choose values. Five-digit ZIP codes will suffice in those boxes. State by 2-letter abbreviation or spelling it out as needed will suffice. If you do not live in one of our great United States, please enter the country in which you reside.

This data will not be used on an individual basis at all. It will only be used in the aggregate where we can market to potential advertisers the percentage of females, males, areas of the country, and members of age groups that any potential advertiser would be interested in finding out before agreeing to place an ad.

Also, no e-mail addresses will be transferred to any advertiser. In fact, our e-mail list is a highly cherished asset and we wouldn't jeopardize our list to be in control of anyone else.

Advertising & Programming Content

A note to some of you who may scoff at the idea of the Political Vine wishing to take advertising. The fact is that any media outlet, whether television stations, radio stations, newspapers, Websites…whatever, exists to provide programming content to attract viewers to their channel. Either they get revenue by charging subscribers or they receive revenue by attracting advertisers. Or, they do both. Somehow, revenue must be generated to support the content production.

When Cable TV started out, it only charged subscription costs. Now, it takes ads in addition to charging subscription costs.

Contrast Cable TV with publications like Creative Loafing who does not charge for subscriptions, but generates enough revenue from their print advertisers.

When a new commercial radio station pops-up and provides commercial-free listening to you, do you really think their purpose is to provide you with a commercial-free listen forever and ever? No, their purpose is to gain an audience of listeners big enough to attract advertisers. Mixed-rock station 105.7 FM in Canton, Georgia started that way 2 years ago.

With this new Website, we have substantial costs that will need to be met. And, it is our hope to continue to provide interesting political commentary and other content that will continue to attract a growing audience that will, in turn, attract advertisers who wish to reach our highly intelligent, and diverse, subscriber base.

We know our readership is pretty intelligent because 1) they like the Political Vine, and 2) because they are interested in keeping-up with current political events. But, we need to know who you are demographically in order to attract the kinds of quality advertisers we want to attract.

The new E-Mail Maintenance procedure will also make it easier for you Democrats who have previously received the Vine via secret forwarding-friends to directly subscribe now because no longer will the e-mail process be managed by a human being who could discern by either the e-mail address or domain what political party you might be associated with.

So, in short, please take the time to give us your demographic information so that we can try to keep this site running with no charge to you. (However, we do reserve the right to ask for financial help later if the advertising idea doesn't workout.)