They all sat down to discuss it over a dinner meeting at a seafood restaurant near campus. The college partners were eager to negotiate a fair share of revenue for their successful management of the website, based its outstanding traffic, like Ivan had promised them. They were up to an average of eight thousand hits per day.

Paul spoke first, without touching his food. Ivan had already handed them the proposed ad rates for comment. “So, you want to charge three hundred dollars per week, a thousand dollars per month, twenty-five hundred for the quarter, and four thousand for a half a year?”

Ivan nodded while cracking open his giant snow crab legs. “That’s reasonable, right?” he mumbled through his food. He wiped his lips with his napkin and said, “I’m basically charging a dollar for each one hundred eighty hits. In other words, for the eight thousand daily hits that we get, I’m charging about forty-five dollars per day until we saturate our ad space or increase our hits. Then we’ll have to raise the price and charge them more. And we always give the better rates to the longer-running advertisers.”

Jeff did his own calculations. He said, “So, that’s a dollar per two hundred forty hits for the month, a dollar per two hundred ninety hits for the quarter, and a dollar for every three hundred and sixty hits for a half a year?”

“If we can get a company to commit for that long,” Ivan answered.

“What if we continue to increase traffic past ten thousand hits per day?” Paul quizzed him.

Ivan said, “Then we’ll raise the rates every three months as the traffic continues to grow. That’s like in any other business. And we still give the most faithful companies the better rates.”

Paul and Jeff understood it with a nod. It was all basic numbers. Jeff then began to pick through his food, while Paul continued to read from Ivan’s printout.

Paul said, “You’re only raising our maintenance fee to five hundred dollars a month?” He sounded slighted. Jeff hadn’t read that far yet.

Ivan answered, “Plus twenty-five percent commission on all created ads. Because you’ll need to keep upgrading the site every time we put up a new one. And I understand that that’s a lot of work,” he admitted to them. “So keep reading.”

Jeff raised his head from his plate. He said, “So we get twenty-five percent of every ad that we create for the site?” It sounded like a sweet deal to him.

Ivan joked and said, “Unless you don’t want it. And not only that, if you actually sell an ad, you’ll pick up the other twenty-five percent commission that I’ll be offering to salespeople.” He continued, “Because I don’t have the time to do it all. So I’m planning on taking out ads for professional salespeople to help us.”