Emma & Maria, Thanksgiving Day dusk, Plum Island, Massachusetts

I've been away since mid-November on business assignments, plus some family time. But I'm now back at work, where each week I receive about two or three e-mailed queries from friends in the new-media business who ask me for informal advice about their professional projects. I've now got a backlog of these requests. Here are two recent examples:

"Not sure if you have seen the digital product that I talked about with you some time ago but it is now available on a free trial that is meant to end shortly. I had thought to inform you earlier but felt a little too uncomfortable putting it to professional scrutiny.

"It's fairly barebones but I actually think with this stuff simplicity is the key. If anything the package is too long. I am trying to get management to extend the free period and let us get the existing userbase to complete an online questionnaire to find out if we have achieved the right content mix and to assess its suitability and useabillity.

"This is a real low budget project and I think the interface needs a lot of tightening up.

"I am attaching a recent issue and you can access the latest version from our site but you will need to register.

"The idea behind the product is that subscribers have an edition they can print on letter or A4 at work and then take home to read over the weekend. I just don't think broadsheets and tabloids work in this type of format but short magazines can. Advertising is a hard sell with small circulations so the revenue has to come from the subscription price.

"If you have time let me know what you think (but don't be too cutting!)."

Or

"Unique monthly users against monthly pageviews:

"For example, if a site has 2.5 million uniques and 120 mm pageviews/month, is that a good ratio - does that mean the viewers look at a lot of pages?

What's a good ratio; what's a bad ratio?"

Please understand that although I'm business friends with these people, I haven't corresponded or talked to them in a year or more. In the years that I've known them, they've never been consulting clients and indeed have declined becoming clients when I have approached them about solving their business problems for a consulting fee. They receive steady salaries from their companies, but I'm unsalaried, self-employed, and live on the income from the fees I receive from my consulting advice.

How should I respond to business friends who ask me to give them for free the professional advice from which I make my livlihood?

My New England upbringing makes me shy away from bluntly pointing out that they should pay if they want my professional advice. Thus I'd for many years just answer their questions rather than point out their temerity. But during the past few years, I've begun feeling like a sucker answering their queries for free. So, lately I've not been answering their e-mails, which isn't a good solution either. However, I can now respond by simply pointing them to this posting.

— Vin Crosbie

p.s.: OK, so you want the answers to those two example questions?

If your daily newspaper site has 2.5 million unique users and generates 120 million pageviews per month, you can't tell whether that's a good or bad ratio until you first examine its visitation frequency -- the missing factor in that equation. For examples: The 2.5 million users could each be visiting daily and viewing 48 pages per day or they could each have visited only once that month and read 120 page that day (either of these examples are the extremes). Monthly usage figures are generally useless benchmarks for daily publications. (Imagine if a weekly magazine were touting its number of annual users!) What should be the benchmark to sites whose content changes daily is the daily usage.