Is your bookmarks file of hip Web sites getting smaller?
Last year, it was Urban Desires - following shortly after Wired Digital's own Pop - that lost its backing. Both became ghost sites.
This year, it's Word, Charged, Total New York, and Spanker that are headed to the digital graveyard - and it's only March.
Call in the augurers of new media. "Content a Tough Sell on Web," ZDNet declared in the wake of the news about Word, Charged, and the New Century Network. The death of Word may have stung the most. Even the not-noticeably hip PC Magazine had lauded the spunky site as "the quintessential ezine." What happened?
Is the Age of Content over on the Web? Should we go back to reading magazines?
Waiting for literacy
Steven Johnson, founding editor of one of the quintessential ezines that shows no sign of going under, Feed, believes the era of editorially substantive and financially viable content sites on the Web is just beginning. What the industry needs, says Johnson, is vision at the top of the masthead, and patience at the bottom line.
"Launching an online magazine today," he observes, "is like starting a print magazine in a market where only 10 percent of the people are literate. The good news is, next year, 20 percent of the people will be literate."
Feed's co-founder, Stephanie Syman, concurs.
"We're doing something experimental in an industry that's still very immature," she says. Expectations by parent companies and investors that online publications will turn a profit faster than print ventures are unrealistic, she contends. This is partially the result of money coming in from backers in the high-tech and telecommunications industries, rather than from media veterans.
"Those notions of success are derived from a technology cycle that is a most inappropriate framework for looking at the success of a magazine," she says, pointing out that magazines on paper don't typically get out of the red for three to five years.
With the failure rate of new print ventures running at a daunting four out of five, according to Samir Husni's Guide to New Consumer Magazines, what's to keep your just-launched Webzine from tanking?
Dan Pelson of Concrete Media, who germinated the core concept of Word for its parent company, Icon CMT, believes that one of the mistakes the Word team made was never to sufficiently identify their readership.
"You define the audience for the audience itself, so they know they can go to your publication and have a certain kind of experience, over and over again," he says, "and you define it for your advertisers and business partners."
Pelson's latest online properties, Bolt and Girls on Film, are aimed at much more closely defined audience niches than the generally cool Word was, and advertisers like Procter and Gamble, Sony, AT&T, and Sprint have signed on.
Even though Word got "tons of great press," Icon was content to use the ezine as its hip calling card, without giving it the ad sales muscle and editorial resources it needed to survive, Pelson says. Pelson predicts the next wave of successful sites will be what Zona Research calls "market makers" - publications that match up targeted audiences and vendors, and are equipped with the e-commerce tools to make transactions on the site.
More than sticker-deep
Stim's editor in chief, Mikki Halpin, was brought to Prodigy to launch the Gen-X-targeted site by former CEO Ed Bennett. The flashy fringe-culture journal was one of Bennett's flagship projects, she says. When the site launched, a Stim sticker was plastered onto the Prodigy stock car.
The problems set in soon after the site came online in May of 1996, Halpin reports, when repeated requests to hold meetings to talk about Stim's business plan were ignored. Bennett was already on his way out of Prodigy, and "we were in our own little world in the office - they were from Sears and IBM, and we were the funny-haired people who smoked," Halpin recalls.
The staff was given plenty of leeway to program edgy content - "they didn't give us one iota of trouble for hiring hookers to write stories," says Halpin - but the Prodigy ad sales team, used to setting up deals with clients like Ford, didn't know how to pitch Stim. By the end of the year, Prodigy was trying to off-load the ezine to "a company that printed folders that went in hotel rooms," Halpin reports, and by January, the staff had been given their severance packages.
Now Stim is Halpin's labor of love, published whenever time and resources allow.
Growing new voices
David Talbot, the editor and CEO of Salon, observes that magazines that are launched as spinoffs of other, non-journalistic ventures, with young staffers who have little experience in reporting and editing, "face difficult sledding."
Still, he believes online publishers have an obligation to "grow new voices."
When Talbot was employed at the San Francisco Examiner, it had been years since anyone in their 20s had been hired on the editorial side, he recalls. Talbot says he made it his business to read through obscure zines looking for bylines he didn't recognize, and now, at Salon, he expects his senior editors to make "the hunt" for new writers part of their daily responsibility.
By offering a mix of young and seasoned voices at Salon, and by attracting an affluent, well-educated readership, Talbot has locked down advertisers like Borders, IBM and Mercedes, and tripled its page-views since last February.
Soon, Salon will open an office in New York to ramp up its presence in Silicon Alley, and a prototype weekly print version is in the works, Talbot says.
Keeping it sticky
For John Borthwick, director of America Online's Digital City Studios, the death of publications like Word signals that the online publishing world is entering a new phase.
"The age of zines is over," he believes - but the days of producing content for much larger audiences are just beginning. When Borthwick sold the studio that produced Total New York and adaweb to AOL a year ago, he says, he saw his page-views soar to one million a day in three days.
Borthwick calls content the "sticky" part of the online experience.
"Content is what creates associative relationships online, peer-to-peer relationships. Content is the experience that sticks with readers," he says. Putting names that readers recognize from other media on the table of contents - such as Pete Hamill and Wendy Wasserstein - helps evoke the trust that makes content "stick," Borthwick believes.
Despite the studio's termination of the Total New York and adaweb brands (adaweb will continue with a non-profit sponsor), Borthwick describes CEO Steve Case as "completely committed to content."
AOL's Regina Borgia explains: "Our average user is spending 52 minutes a day on the service now. First they emailed, then they chatted, and this Christmas, they shopped online. Now they're looking deeper. The content has to be there."
