This is not a prospectus. All investments are subject to risk. Please review our official prospectus, our latest SEC filings, and the plea bargain documents in "Outraged Dupes vs. MuskratCo Enterprises Inc.," before sending any money.
We here at Muskrat News are often asked "Do you want me to call you a cab?" But when we wake up the next day, the question most often asked is "What's your business plan? Where does your cash come from?" Our response is: If we worded the note correctly, the money should be in non-sequentially-numbered small bills, so you we doubt you can trace it.
But what about future revenues? On the occasion of our ten-percent anniversary (see below), we have decided to unveil our business model.
The typical business model for a content-based web site like ours is to sell ad space on the site, supplementing that income with the flogging of T-shirts, coffee mugs, and prosthetic limbs emblazoned with the site's logo. We do not feel that such measures are appropriate, because the ads are often for other sites of dubious quality or integrity. As for coffee mugs, we feel they would not be consistent with the dignified tone we try to set here. Plus, we suspect our readers already own glassware, not to mention utensils and clothing.
Some Blogs solicit reader contributions via PayPal, essentially asking readers to contribute cash to "keep the site running." Since this is the equivalent of panhandling on the sidewalk, we like to think that we have not - yet - sunk that far. Also, it has not escaped our attention that we know each and every one of our readers by name already, making large cash donations unlikely.
So how are we going to get rich? Simple. Stock options. We currently control 99.99999% of MuskratCo Enterprises stock. (We gave one share to the Pope when he called to complain about yesterday's Line Of The Day and threatened to excommunicate us.)
Yahoo/Geocities charges us $9/month to host the site. The content is, obviously, free. Thus we are losing only $108/year. Amazon.com loses billions, and has a market capitalization of over $17 Billion. We figure, since we are billions of dollars closer to profitability than Amazon, we should be worth billions more. Our current estimate of the net value of MuskratCo Enterprises shares is thus $30 Billion. Of course, this number is purely theoretical. We have not yet received SEC permission to list our shares on the Waxahatchee Swamp and Nature Preserve Stock Exchange (motto "The NASDAQ of the Tidewater!"). But when we do, we are confident that all of the desperate investors who really, really, really want the internet bubble to come back will come flocking to our door, cash in hand. At that point, we cash out, buy ourselves a Caribbean Island, and spend the rest of our days frolicking like drunken muskrats.
If that doesn't work, it's back to liquor store holdups.
TEN PERCENT ANNIVERSARY
In exchange for our $9/month, in addition to our domain name, we get twenty-five megabytes of storage on their server. Because of our content-heavy encoding scheme (i.e., mostly words, few pictures), we use very little of that space. In fact, today is the first day we have reached 2.5 M out of 25 - 10%. Since we have been 'operating' since April, we can probably go on like this for at least another four years before running out of storage. (We ran out of ideas a long time ago.) Celebrating milestones like this is one of the things that can help a scrappy band of misfits meld into a rugged team of world-beating humorists. In years to come, we'll look back on the paper cups full of cheap champagne, the government-surplus office furniture wobbling on the scarred and uneven floors, and even the lack of air conditioning here at MuskratCo offices with a warm glow of nostalgia for simpler times.