Say farewell to cool.infi.net. The Web site that helped turn "cool" into an Internet mantra is up for sale. This week, InfiNet, an East Coast "Internet access and service venture designed to help put newspapers online," announced that it would be divesting itself of Cool Site of the Day as of 1 January, and is looking for the right company to buy it and its sister e-pubs.
"It's not one of our core businesses at InfiNet. We need to focus our resources where we think we're going to have the biggest return," explains Steve Fuschetti, executive VP of finance at InfiNet. "We believe the sites have great value and we want them to live on past their life at InfiNet...."
Cool Site of the Day has a long Web history - it launched as a two-page site in 1994, created by Glenn Davis, that featured a different unique site everyday; today, it boasts millions of page-views a month, a yearly awards extravaganza, and two spin-off sites (Live Online and Byte Size Greetings) that total more than a hundred pages of content. Defining Cool for the masses, Cool Site has spawned a thousand imitators and given tens of thousands of hits to many otherwise-unknown zines, homepages, and miniature games.
When Cool Site was created, InfiNet had no idea it would grow into an eight-person mini-e-publishing empire - especially considering that the rest of the 200-person company has nothing to do with content creation. Site producer Richard Grimes asserts that the staff knew that the sale was going to come sometime.
"We were always a strange part of InfiNet," admits Grimes.
Although the producers currently have no idea if they will be retained after the sale, everyone has faith that the site will live on in some form - and believe it would benefit from the expertise of a content-oriented owner.
"We have a pretty recognizable name and brand - it's pretty valuable, and traffic is robust," says Grimes. "I can't imagine someone not buying it. It does something good, and it does it successfully."
