NEW YORK - For the much-anticipated launch of AOL's major foray into the local content market with Digital City NY, the Vienna, Virginia, behemoth recognized that in Manhattan, success has more to do with the guest list than the party itself. To that end, the Web site that will debut in January will include contributions from a high-profile list of New Yorkers (and Net newbies) including playwright Wendy Wasserstein, performer Spalding Gray, Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, and musicians Ruben Blades and David Byrne.
With such a top-heavy roster, Digital City creators are hoping to tower over Sidewalk and CitySearch by pouring money not into databases or restaurant reviews by interns, but expensive "marquee" content.
"Frankly, I don't know why Sidewalk and CitySearch haven't tried to do this," says Guy Garcia, the executive producer at the Digital City Studio, the editorial and design greenhouse in Manhattan that is producing the site. "If you want to build a site that has the flavor of NY, you need people involved. This is not a celebrity site or just a big bunch of names.... Our aim has always been to provide all the functionality and reviews, but also to raise the bar editorially."
The name cast has been called upon to write about their own New York stories. Wasserstein will contribute a series on "Sophisticated New York," Walcott will write about Paul Simon's new musical, Capeman, and Blades will offer a perspective on Latino life in the city. Garcia hopes to build out the site's more pragmatic services from their essays. "Wendy's piece will have a practical payoff," assures Garcia.
In addition to the litany of city-guide listings, Digital City NY will also steal a page from GeoCities by offering homepages in a "neighborhood"-like format. In the "Neighbors@" area, users will be able to collect themselves at "houses" that represent clubs or racing groups to "close the loop back to reality," says Garcia.
Though Digital City has already been rolled out in 27 cities, the New York site will provide the template for an extensive redesign of the service, set to happen next year. Of the 27 current sites, Digital City has full-blown sites only in 16 markets nationwide, including Boston, Orlando, south Florida, and Chicago, but only six of the cities have real services on the Web (the rest are within AOL). Of the remaining, the sites can be spotty, simply place-holder "Web guide" sites with the barest minimum of local resource listings. The New York site is currently very meager.
In some fashion, the New York market is Digital City's to lose. With some 900,000 AOL subscribers in the New York metro area, Digital City NY could stand to become the highest-traffic city guide on the market (the closest follower is San Francisco, with 500,000 AOL members). "Even if you want to slam AOL on the content side, to be able to market content to an already established audience - that gives Digital City a huge advantage," says Jupiter analyst Patrick Keane. "The others, like Sidewalk and CitySearch, have to spend marketing money just to get eyeballs to the site."
Name writers and strong editorial content - not just functionality - have proven to be key assets in Boston. Boston.com, the two-year-old guide built out from the Boston Globe newspaper, sees 1 million pageviews a day, and the Globe's news and sports features are "the major component" to draw the traffic, says Boston.com's Lincoln Millstein. Millstein says competitor Sidewalk will struggle to find its niche without breaking news and well-known local journalists. "I think it's difficult for city guides to draw the kind of traffic that you need to do a viable business based on just offering an arts and entertainment package," says Millstein.
But even as Digital City is skyrocketing the standard for editorial content, its reach may extend far beyond its financial grasp. "They've raised the bar and pumped up their expenses," says Forrester analyst Seema Williams. "They will struggle with such a high-cost structure.... The question is, how much can they bleed content?"
