Lee,

No offense but I find the way you act and react on serious posts quite a joke.

topbucks, silvercash and other straight companies adding a few gay sites isn't a cross over. It's commercializing and tapping into a gay market.
Pretty much same happened 8 years ago with the 'fetish' market.
Huge difference between the real fetish sites and the commercial festish sites that came up after that.
it's pretty much the same as a 100% gay webmaster launching a 'teen pussy' program. Guaranteed his retention will be below average.

And for the record: I wasn't too busy with finding ceo's. I run a 150 staff company so I happen to know the frustrations of going to events and getting nothing done. This was also the reason I started the event to start with, same as we started klixxx that way and many other ventures.

What you could learn from people that run mainstream sites with millions of dollars in revenue is how to maximize this revenue and traffic. When I look at any of your sites I see at least 5 small procedures that are not in use on your sites but are in use by pretty much any straight operator. Probably would add 10-15% revenue on the fly, but I guess 10-15% doesn't mean all that much to you?

For the record: I posted here to have a constructive discussion, not to be bashed.

Michael:
Thanks for a long reply.

Some remarks:
In any business you have different layers of providers. You describe yourself as an 'independent webmaster'.
During IG we always have 10-20 people that are 100% comped by either us or a sponsor or I see a personal value in this person. The way we look at this is very simple: if I know you have X amount of traffic or X amount of other business and by inviting you we might end up doing $20k/yr in business it does pay off.
Very simple return on investment formula.

In your case: if your traffic volume would be big enough and this is known in the market changes are you would get an invite.
I agree with you that forking out a minimum of $3k doesn't make any sense to most people. To be educated on traffic etc. you don't need to fly to an island, you better stay home on go on the boards or come together with 3-4 other guys and create your own learning weekend (but invite at least one straight site webmaster;-) )
Once you grow your business and end up with e.g. 5-10 staff members your needs change. All of a sudden you don't have time anymore to look around and check what the competition is doing but you're busy managing your staff. Those people are the typical guys (and girls) we target.

In the old days CE(cash) brought together tons of mid size and smaller webmasters with almost monthly small events in cities around the US which seem to be what's missing these days.

I like your idea on the 10 minute sessions. I believe phoenix form had a 'passporte' to collect stamps. Not sure if there was any comp after finishing that.

I can't agree more with you on the booth space: 100% blowing money to show off with a big booth. End of day this turns into branding and return on investment is hard to measure. On top of that the traffic passing by has no idea who to talk to: the models or the people working the booth?

Grant:
Good idea. ;-)

F.