Agree :)

Yep, we must make a choice, time or money

Do you think you will be broke before getting your money back? Please remember that you must pay the for the services :)

I value my time.

It’s the marketer who’s spending time research and understanding and improving his or her marketing campaigns who’s going to win the race.

The catch is we can’t get rich without doing investment :)

But what do you do if it’s a new tool? Do you want to give it a try?

If you are trying to start any kind of business without any budget, that’s unrealistic.

You need to have SOME capital to start with.

I’m sure people have enough resources to pick up a new skill.

Like you said, the main reason to inflate your numbers is to get advertisers and be able to charge more per ad.

It’s a little short-sighted to look at a product or service in terms of cost only.

If something costs $1,000 per year, but brings me $20,000 of profit, you can bet your last dollar I’m going to use that and even pay more if it can be even more effective.

Any business owner will be smart enough to realize that it’s return on investment, rather than just cost alone that determines the value of a product or service.

IMO, leader set the standards, sheep follow the leaders.

Rather than try to tie your “popularity” or competence to an arbitrary number, given the randomness of some of these stats, it’s better to use a more relevant metric like ROI or net profits to measure the worth of your biz or your blog.

You could have 500,000 feed subscribers, but if you’re struggling to meet your hosting costs, you have a problem bigger than a piddly adsense or blog ads check could solve…

Think long term and you’ll come out alright.