The popular cable venture Black Entertainment Television has premiered MSBET, a massive online venture produced with Microsoft. The site, which went up Wednesday, is the first of several prominent content projects hoping to use Black History Month as a way of bringing blacks - and their incomes - online.
"It's about encouraging our community to come into the information age," says Barry Johnson, president of MSBET.
MSBET was created as a preview special for Black History Month, and will officially launch in May as a much larger site offering "content with an urban sensibility." Meanwhile, a newly revamped NetNoir and the upcoming content network from magazine publisher American Visions Society (AVS), are also taking advantage of Black History Month for launch visibility.
The number of blacks using online services is around 1.6 million, a Simmons 1996 online usage study found. But Johnson claims that number could be as high as 4 million, counting those who have access through school and work. Although the number is small compared to the rest of the online world - 6.6 percent of the total Net population - the demographic itself is appealing to advertisers.
"We think of them as black gold," says David Ellington, president and CEO of NetNoir. "If you look at their indices as consumer, they buy electronics, homes, automobiles, fashion, etc., they're middle-class blacks. That's a serious market."
It's not surprising, then, that big players like Microsoft and BET are looking to target the market. But the companies are also emphasizing the community aspects of their projects: Besides targeting the current online audience, MSBET and AVS hope that offering immense amounts of content will entice the non-wired black population to log in. "We're going to alter the world a little," says Gary Puckrein, president of AVS. "We're putting so much content up there it's going to attract a lot of interest."
Content, in the case of AVS, means offering more than 2 million articles on its site. The AVS network, launching on 17 February, will offer membership to an enormous database of Web-based content geared toward blacks, including chat rooms, virtual classrooms, and RealAudio broadcasts, for an annual fee of US$55.
AVS's strategy - based on the controversial belief that users will pay a subscription fee for content - is strikingly different from the approach that NetNoir, the most successful black site to date, is beginning to take. NetNoir is shifting the focus in its AOL area, which has seen its audience grow 250 percent since flat-rate pricing, to community, and away from content.
"I don't see content as a business model just yet," Ellington states. "When the Internet is ubiquitous and people want to subscribe to specific content, that model will make sense. We believe in entertaining interactivity, not content."
Besides chat rooms or content, budgets will likely end up making a difference in the attempt to draw audiences online. BET's established cable-TV and magazine audience of more than 51 million, plus an advertising budget to reach them, may be a boon to the entire industry.
"We are going to stimulate the market and create a driving need," Puckrein states. "I can't imagine a parent that wouldn't look at this and not want it in their house for their children."
