There are a few questions in there.
The first thing is how do we exist? I moved to Toronto in January 2008 with an idea and I said I was going to try to build this, a media company that was going to create Canadian content, targeting the Canadian market, at a time when the stock market was dropping 40%. People literally laughed at me. They said, “Why are you going to invest in Canada? Can't you make this into a global thing?” I couldn't find even a cent to put behind this idea.
Friends and family put a little bit of money behind me basically keeping me alive for a few months while I was doing consulting work out of my basement.
Eventually, we found a group of private investors who were prepared to put some funds behind the idea, the reason being that they saw there was some potential in building a platform. They saw that, in terms of mobilizing a community of experts, there was a proven model in the United States called “The Huffington Post”. They saw that this thing could grow and become profitable. Without that element, this could never have happened. We didn't have a business model at that time. We had ideas that we wanted to incubate and experiment with, and they believed in it. That's how we got started.
How do we make money? We don't right now. In fact, we have almost no revenue at all. We have some number of months left before we're dead. But we are doing a number of things that I think are going to be very successful. One is advertising, standard advertising but not standard, because we can host conversations at The Mark where people who are contributing to that conversation are really interesting and we can engage a lot of people. So as an ad model, it's a little bit different.
We can syndicate content. We can sell it. We believe we can curate communities for universities and other companies that have communities of people who produce content.
For example, we have a partnership with Amazon.com where, if somebody comes to write for our website, there's a link on that page to Amazon.com where that person's books are featured. So you write something today as an author at The Mark, commenting on a current news story, and boom, traffic is flowing to your page at Amazon, your books are being sold, and we get a commission on that.
There are a variety of other things we can do as a media company to profit. We're not even close to there yet, but we're getting there very quickly.
To distill my remarks down to a summary, I would say the only way we could survive is if we were able to demonstrate to discriminating investors that we were going to be able to create something that would be self-sustaining and that was going to capitalize on trends and be sustainable into the future.