Adam Toren
co-founder
YoungEntrepreneur.com

First of all, I don’t think I have ever been called a rock star in my life. Wow. Thanks Jeremy.

Second, I want everyone to know that the silence that Jeremy heard from Hal Halladay and myself as the owners of Know More Media was due to the fact that we have been out of touch. I have been completely off the grid for the past 10 days in a remote part of northeastern Washington with my family, without cell phone or internet access. Hal was volunteering his time (because that is the kind of guy he is) last week at a Scout Camp, so he was out of touch as well. So yesterday was the first day that I knew of Jeremy’s attempts to reach us and the first day that Hal and I had a chance to talk about it.

So we weren’t avoiding Jeremy, I was just not aware he was trying to reach out to us.

Third, we are very appreciative of Jeremy’s continued interest in Know More Media. We have tried to put something together since a year ago February and it just didn’t come together. There are no hard feelings and know that the decisions made on both sides were business decisions, where each party was looking out for what they felt was best. We wish Jeremy and the b5media team big success down the road, which they richly deserve.

Fourth, while we are ceasing to pay our incredible authors as of August 1st and we are saying good-bye to our amazing staff of Dan, Easton, and Kimberly, we don’t see that to be the death of Know More Media. We hope to lower our expenses for a few months, take care of some of our liabilities that Hal and I have been carrying, take care of our search engine ranking issues, and then be able to relaunch the network.

If any of our capable and extremely talented authors or staff want to rejoin the network at that time, we would welcome them back with open arms.

Maybe Hal and I are deluded and maybe we won’t be able to wake Know More Media back from a long slumber, but at this point, we are willing to try.

Fifth, we continue to be open to proposals from Jeremy or from any others. So far the past offers didn’t match up with the value Hal and I see in the network. But we are willing to discuss and divulge any stats needed to evaluate what we have. As our authors will attest, we have always tried to be very transparent with our stats and our business situation.

Sixth, we encourage any author to write for b5media if they want. I know several of our authors already write for them and they have always spoken well of their experience there. If not b5media, I hope all the authors will be able to find other ways to be rewarded for the great content that you create. We regret that we have come to the point to take this step. We have tried to be as honest and straightforward with you as possible and made sure you knew what what decisions were being made and why we were making them.

Seventh, it is our intent to try to keep the network intact while we are taking this “hiatus”. If there are individual cases of authors interested in buying their domain and content, we will negotiate those on an individual basis, but that is not our intent for the network as a whole.

Eighth, we still believe in the model and in the future of niche, targeted fresh quality content written by experts. While we did, as Marshall pointed out, make mistakes, we think we did some things right as well and we hope to be able to continue our vision down the road. It still is amazing that a small little team was able to build a network of experts from around the world, pay them, and get millions to read that content. We are so proud of the quality authors that wrote for us. So many of them are so accomplished and respected in their fields. It always amazed us that they would be willing to be part of what we were doing. We also want to acknowledge the the amazing team of Dan, Easton and Kimberly that supported the authors. It was an honor to associate with these fine individuals.

Thanks again Jeremy for your interest in the welfare of Know More Media. Hopefully, we will rejoin the fray in the future and continue to have further associations.

Just so you know, we’ll be issuing a new proposal today, and hopefully it honors what you and the other KMM bloggers have built without locking you into anything long term

Everyone suffered from the Google Penalty and Reddit, Digg are there for a reason and someone using then doesnt amount to their content being weak.

Anyways I dont want to talk about this issue here.

And as far as my traffic numbers, before the Google Penalty, they were generated entirely by my writing – I did nothing with Digg, Reddit, or anything else but simply write – my content generated the traffic I got, which was often quite a bit.

Hope that helps, and please don’t take what I said as an attack or challenge.

Thanks,
Marshall