As some of you may know, I now work for an online ad network in New York. I am learning tons about how advertising on the Internet works, but what I've learned most is how badly I've managed Melo's earning potential over the years.

Melo is a time & money suck. It is not profitable. I pay for it out of my own pocket because it's my hobby, a place I love, and because it means a lot to me. You should hear my more business savvy friends tease me about it, "So Sara, are you running a business or a charity?"

You see, if you're a real entrepreneur, you don't LOVE the thing you're starting. You don't invest your heart and soul into your business, because it's just a business, and you have to be objective when things start going sour. All of my advisors have told me to just shut Melo down. It doesn't make money, it will never make money, it just stresses me out.

And to that I say, suck a bag of dicks.

Yeah, I'm stubborn and rebellious and really not that much of an entrepreneur. This place is my home, it's a home for many of you, and I won't give it up just because I suck at business. I am still SURE there is a way to carve out at least a little break-even, but hopefully enough extra scratch to justify spending some hours a week working on it.

You see, if I made more than -$15/hour writing code for this site, I would write more code for this site. Hell I'll even take minimum wage. But it's tough to justify spending 5 hours fixing Melo bugs which nets a negative income, versus spend 5 hours starting a new project or freelancing on something that might net me, oh, $1,000 for the same amount of time.

What would you do? Make $1k or lose $500? Not a tough choice right?

Whatevs. Now I work for an ad network and I'm learning about advertisements on the Internet and that gives us fresh hope to try and put a few things in place for Melo to break even, and possibly even net a little income. Hopefully enough income to invest in offshore programmers to upgrade this site, etc etc.

Now, I wholeheartedly apologize for that blinking monstrosity over there that says "WINNER WINNER WINNER", we are the very same ad network that ran "Punch the Monkey" in the late 90s. I have the ability to tune the quality of ads that we see so over the next few weeks I'll be turning off ugly ads and emphasizing awesome ads and pretty soon we won't even notice that new block.

And if things start getting exciting, and I can get my new work friends to help me, who knows, I might even start sending a few hundred dollars a month offshore to pay for a few upgrades and enhancements here and there.

Please know that I love you, but I love you sort of like a parent loves her child who has a drug problem and keeps borrowing money and can't keep a real job. It's like, Jesus kid, when do I get to stop worrying about you and just watch you grow up and fend for yourself?

Fend for yourself already, Melo.

PS -- I launched a new "fix" today that will check every 5 minutes for users that have broken public folders and attempt to fix them. There were 50,000 users with fucked folders so at the current rate it will take about 2 days for all the users to get fixed, and then from there on new registrations should work fine within about 5 minutes of registration. Yeah, it's not a very good fix, but the bug is too deep for me to figure it out right now so instead I just wrote some fix-it code.

PPS -- Miss you guys!