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Welcome to Rob Caskey's Sports Marketing on the Internet Web site. This site offers visitors a quick and easy way to download the complete text of my masters thesis, "An Examination of the Attitudes of Sports Marketers Toward the Use and Viability of the World Wide Web as a Profitable Tool for Marketing Sports." The thesis available on this site was conducted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master's degree that I earned from The George Washington University in December 1998. Additional information about my academic and professional background is available in the About the Researcher section of this site. The data on which my thesis is based was culled in April and May 1998. A 39-question survey was sent to representatives of 158 sports Web sites. This survey was intended to gauge the opinions of sports marketers with regard to the marketing and money-making potential of sports Web sites. Forty-five respondents from some of the top sports Web sites successfully completed the survey. The results of the survey were very revealing. Among some of the major findings were the following: 63% of the respondents indicated that they employed one or zero full-time employees 40% of the respnodents believed that underwriting and sponosorship would generate the highest amount of revenue for their sites one year in the future (April-May 1999) 18% of the respondents indicated that they might charge a fee for content one year in the future 79% of the respondents spent less than $10,000 promoting their sites in 1997 33% of the respondents claimed to have generated no revenue online in 1997 43% of the respondents indicated that their sites are currently profitable 64% of the respondents indicated that profitability was a current goal 96% of the respondents believed that, in general, sites offering sports content or marketing through sports are currently capable of turing a profit on the Web For more details, you may download my thesis, either as a zipped Word 6.0 document (requires WinZip), or as an Acrobat PDF file (requires Acrobat Reader). Alternatively, you may read the abstract for a quick overview of the thesis. I would like to thank all of the site representatives who took the time to complete this survey, without whom I would not have been able to complete my thesis. If you are having trouble downloading either of these files, or if you would like to contact me with questions about my research, please send an e-mail to rob_caskey@yahoo.com Rob Caskey