p2pnet’s final days?

p2pnet is on the verge of going offline. Our income dropped by 80% as of December 28.

Several times in 2006 I said I was able to keep going only thanks to the advertisers and some people believe that, like certain other sites, I’m raking it in. But scraping by would be more accurate. Revenue generated by the advertisements keeps us going and at the beginning of 2006, it amounted to slightly less than $C3,000 a month. This allowed me to feed my family, pay my mortgage and service the debts I’d incurred largely to establish p2pnet. Because it took quite a while to get to that point and before it was reached, we lived off our savings and a couple of bank loans. So I wasn’t then, and definitely am not now, getting rich. Moreover, all costs and expenses have gone up considerably.

Early in the year, the Big 4 Organized Music gang turned on LimeWire, one of my advertisers. LimeWire pulled their booking, and then it was BearShare’s turn. Two down, and I was in deep trouble. Again, I had to borrow money to stay online. But in July a small group in Europe offered to make up the difference between what I was getting in ad revenues and what I needed to keep posting, and that’s the way things stayed during the summer and fall.

Then a few weeks back, one of my remaining advertisers unexpectedly cut back on its booking as well and finally, on December 28, the money from Europe was also abruptly cut off. This means my income has now been slashed by four-fifths which is, of course, a huge amount.