[Franz Neumeier]

Dear friends,

from my plea for help regarding our video in the "Reporter at Sea" contest (Reporter at Sea - Royal Caribbean Video Contest - Der perfekte Job für Carmen) I received a few (very few) e-mails that are indicating that there might be a misconception here and there abouth the "profits" steamboats.org is making. Hence, they ask me why I'm asking for the favor to vote for our video while I could easily buy us a cruise on the Oasis of the Seas from the profits we're making with steamboats.org ...

Let me clarify this, just in case anyone thinks we're making lots of money with the advertizing on steamboats.org: This is simply not the case at all.

The advertizing you see on the site about pays for the direct expenses such as webserver, domain name and software licenses which sums up to roughly about $ 180 per month. By the way, we're not getting paid for just showing the ads; it's only paying (pennies) when someone clicks on one of the ads, which only about 1% of the visitors do.

Steamboats.org is and always has been a non-profit website which we built up and operate in the evenings and on weekends, spending hundreds and thousands or hours over the years to keep up this place as a meeting point and online community for steamboat and river fans.

Running steamboats.org is literally my only hobby, but it's fun. Your friendship is reward enough for that work and we were never even considering to push in the direction of a commercial website with this.

So I'm not feeling bad at all when asking you for the favor to vote for us in that contest as I think it's a great chance to give something back for all the efforts we're putting into this website; and it cost you almost nothing - just a few mouse clicks - to vote a couple of times for us.

Well, enough with this. Have fun, continue to enjoy steamboats.org. I just thought it's important to mention this just in case someone thought we can make a good living out of steamboats.org and don't need any support ;-)))

Franz