If you'd be into brushing up on your French or catching a couple of bars of a new rock riff while waiting for Web pages to load, you might be a candidate for the Zing Network, which launched today. The new "online entertainment network" replaces a browser's blank screen during pageloading with amusements like photos, trivia, music clips, and animation.
Using patented technology that pulls rich image and sound files off Zing's servers and onto your hard drive when your browser isn't active, the plug-in then has native access to the content and can pop it up on your screen when your browser is busy loading the next page.
But "Zing spots are more than filler," says Mark Platshon, Zing's CEO and president, who was sporting a grin and a tremendous tie polka-dotted with faces of South Park characters during a recent interview. Platshon sees the spots more along the lines of the Milestones section and quotes of the week that run in Time magazine. Suggesting that Web design to date has made little room for such human-interest snippets, he said "we've found the space to do that on the Web."
Content -- everything from reproductions of vintage posters and nature photography to sound clips of the Smashing Pumpkins -- is supplied by partners like the Rolling Stone Network, Chronicle Books, and Car & Driver. At this point no money is changing hands; Zing is collaborating with its partners to produce channels of jokes, art, photography, quotes, car culture, music, foreign language flashcards -- everything but news and serious stuff. The Zing model is to send traffic to its partners' sites, which will in turn promote downloads of Zing software. Each party will share ad revenue.
The problem is, despite Zing's promised ratio of 90 percent content to 10 percent ads, the content (such as a 10-second sound bite from a band, along with a photo and a link to Rolling Stone Online) just doesn't look that different from advertising.
"If it's content that they're selling, it's microcontent, sliced and diced so thin that you've got to wonder if it's worth it," said Jim Balderston, an analyst at Zona Research.
In fact, it is hard to imagine Plashton's whole grand vision coming to fruition. He expects that millions of home users will download Zing because they want to be entertained between pageloads; that partners will invest in developing their own Zing channels using Macromedia Flash; that advertisers will sign on and create special full-screen ads for the service; and that Zing will evolve into something like a portal site as bandwidth beefs up and eliminates the wait between pageloads.
"There's always someone trying to discover this mystical, magical pot of revenue" lurking between pageloads, said Evan Neufeld, senior advertising analyst at Jupiter Communications.
"It's not a question of whether you can do it technologically," added Neufeld. "The issue is whether the consumer perceives that their experience is slowing down," he said, and whether people actually want to be entertained during the wait time or if they just want the wait to go away. And that doesn't even get into the hairy area of getting home users to download a client and install it.
Platshon, however, believes people will go out of their way to be entertained. He pointed out that studies show the average home user clicks through 25 pages a day, waiting 10 seconds between pages -- and therefore spending 25 hours a year just waiting. And many of them, he added, watch TV at the same time. "This is about entertaining a passionate audience," he said.
Perhaps there is a passionate audience, but the time available to entertain them is going to shrink dramatically as high-speed cable modems and DSL take root and eliminate the lazy crawl of a 28.8 Kbps modem.
"We need to evolve as the Web gets faster," said Platshon. Eventually he expects Zing's channel selector to grow from the current handful of offerings to 100, then 1,000 separate channels -- and spawn a Web site of choices. "The site becomes a place Zing users go to at least once a day to see what's new -- and it becomes a major destination Web site," Platshon forecasted.
It'll take some major marketing muscle to make Zing the next Yahoo, however. Zing, which got its start as a technology company called Streamix and only recently morphed into a self-proclaimed publishing company, will distribute CD-ROMs across the country -- some handed out from a new VW Bug painted with the company's signature red pepper on a blinding yellow background. But other than that, Zing officials revealed no big ad campaigns.
It's another time-will-tell story, although some are already placing bets. As Jupiter's Neufeld put it: It doesn't seem likely that "the majority of consumers are going to go out of their way to get more cool dancing ads and talking frogs."
