GeoCities' new CEO, Tom Evans, is a hard-driving salesman who doesn't intend to waste any time before he starts knocking on doors in the online community's 40 neighborhoods, seeking to increase the revenue that GeoCities' 1.7 million "homesteaders" generate.
Evans' goal at the Santa Monica, California-based company will be to prove that the business model of "personal publishing" can work, shepherding GeoCities to an initial public offering as early as this fall.
Skeptics say that advertisers haven't yet shown a strong commitment to buying banners on sites hosted by GeoCities, despite solid traffic numbers, and that potential investors may not immediately grasp the personal publishing concept, where users create and manage their own content.
Fresh from a successful stint as president and publisher of US News & World Report, where he helped increase the magazine's ad pages and launch Fast Company, a sister publication, the 43-year-old Evans was hired by David Bohnett, GeoCities' founder, to prove the skeptics wrong. When Evans assumes his new role on 11 May, he'll be dedicated to figuring out how to bolster and diversify GeoCities' revenue streams.
"GeoCities has the two building blocks that you look for in any strong Web property: traffic and affinity," says Evans. It was ranked as the seventh most-visited site for March by RelevantKnowledge. "But it's been underbranded, underpromoted, and undersold to date. We need to figure out how to take advantage of the substantial traffic and turn this into a working business."
Few who know Evans, an avid and highly competitive golfer, doubt that he can work his sales and marketing magic on GeoCities. "He's the best ad salesperson I've ever seen in my life," says one colleague who has worked closely with Evans. "He's smart, he's smooth, and he's an all-around blue-chip guy. What GeoCities needs right now is credibility, and Tom can bring that credibility."
Evans spent 13 years working for US News & World Report, initially as an ad salesperson. In 1991, he was promoted to publisher, and he dramatically increased the number of ad pages the magazine sold each month, despite being consistently ranked third in circulation, behind Time and Newsweek. From 1992 to 1994, US News led all news magazines in ad pages. In 1995, Evans helped to launch Fast Company, a business magazine, and in 1997 was promoted to president and publisher of the magazine group that includes US News, Fast Company, and the Atlantic Monthly, all of which are privately held by investors Mortimer Zuckerman and Fred Drasner.
Before joining the US News organization, Evans sold ads at Penton Publishing, a Cleveland company that operates 26 trade magazines, including titles like Ergonomics News and Hydraulics and Pneumatics.
"His experience with advertisers and agencies is directly transferable to GeoCities," said Bohnett, who will relinquish the CEO's role and serve as chairman. "And we were very impressed with his role in helping formulate and start Fast Company." Asked to describe Evans' management style, Bohnett said it was characterized by "collaboration, consensus-building, and recognizing achievement no matter what level a person is at."
In addition, says David Wetherell, chairman of GeoCities investor CMG Information Services, "Tom's professional network is in New York, the center of the media and advertising industry, so that played particularly well to the board." Evans will maintain a residence in New York, but work out of GeoCities' headquarters in Southern California.
Despite Evans' vaunted sales skills, the new CEO will face a number of substantial challenges at GeoCities. One is advertisers' wariness about buying into community sites. "Advertisers find the quality of personal pages to be less desirable than the portal sites like Yahoo and Lycos," says Chris Charron, an analyst with Forrester Research. Additionally, community sites like GeoCities, Angel Fire, and Tripod must constantly be on the look-out for objectionable content; flaps have erupted in the past when advertisers were paired with offensive home pages. And GeoCities' homesteaders haven't always reacted warmly to advertising incursions on their server space.
Evans says he'll be sensitive to homesteader reaction to the increasing level of commercial noise in their neighborhoods. "If you change things, you're always going to have to gauge the readers' level of acceptance," he says. "And you have to try to give them something that's a benefit rather than an intrusion."
Indeed, Bohnett predicted that his new hire will need to undergo a change in mindset. "Our editorial strategy is much more organic than the publications he's been managing. There will be some acclimation to the notion of reader-generated content, rather than editor-generated content," Bohnett said.
Evans seems willing to learn and adjust to his new post. "I don't have all the answers now," he said, when asked how he would implement new advertising and commerce strategies without alienating users, "but I hope to come up with some of them. The great thing about this environment is you can try lots of new things in a short period of time."
GeoCities faces a formidable competitor in Tripod, purchased by Lycos in February for $58 million. GeoCities' population is larger, with 1.7 million members to Tripod's 1.1 million. But the sparring over who attracts more traffic has already begun. In RelevantKnowledge's March usage report, it ranked the combined Lycos/Tripod sites as the sixth most-visited on the Web, ahead of GeoCities. But the press release issued Wednesday, announcing Evans' appointment as CEO, touted GeoCities as the sixth most-trafficked Web site, apparently uncoupling Tripod's numbers from Lycos'.
And in addition to building traffic, luring more advertisers, and introducing new commerce arrangements like the recently launched GeoShops, Evans will undoubtedly be working with Bohnett to explore the possibility of an IPO. Telling a coherent story about GeoCities' future may be the biggest job of all.
"I think investors might have a difficult time understanding [GeoCities'] business model and feeling secure about it," says Charron at Forrester. "Not many people get personal publishing yet. GeoCities has a ways to go to prove the viability of their business model to investors."
Wetherell at CMG pooh-poohs those qualms. "Personally, I think we could take GeoCities public tomorrow," he says. "Obviously, we want Tom to be very much involved in that decision. With his professional guidance and leadership, it can not just be a strong IPO, but a strong public media company."
