Excite CEO George Bell's battle plan for the Web's reach war.
__ George Bell knows the power of eyeballs - without them an emerging culture can quickly become a vanishing one. Unlike other CEOs brought in pre-IPO to inject maturity into young Net pioneers, Bell is an old media survivor. As writer-producer of adventure documentaries in the '80s, he tracked down Amazon tribes and scaled Everest - four Emmys sit prominently in Excite's Redwood City, California, headquarters. As senior VP at Times Mirror Magazines, he used titles like TransWorld SNOWboarding to reach a monthly circulation of 9 million, then launched the cable Outdoor Life Network. And in two-plus years at Excite, he's seen the struggling content publisher become a booming portal with 20 million visitors a month.
In his third career incarnation, Bell, 41, is legendary for his dealmaking hustle. Still, he knows that another breathless partnership won't by itself ensure success in the broadband future. Wired asked the man in constant motion how the Web's landscape will look when the handshakes are over.
__
Wired: "Portal" is the season's hot buzzword. Are portals to '98 what push was to '97?
Bell: Portals aren't a delivery mechanism - portals are the Web.
So what is a portal exactly?
Hubs, portals, search engines - they all boil down to the same thing: an efficient starting point that allows you to cut through the confusion of the Web and get to the information you want. There's a landgrab going on to become that starting point, and the rewards will be good for whoever's left standing.
Who makes the cut?
In any business that synthesizes consumer interaction with content or information - magazines, network television, even packaged goods - there are two or three dominant players. The rest are survivable niche businesses. You have the three big networks plus Fox; Time and Newsweek plus U.S. News & World Report. The Web's starting points will be distinguished by brand, what it stands for, and the gestalt it gives people.
Is brand everything?
Companies like Netscape were brands before anyone even knew what they did, but they built their brand as the darling of Wall Street. We want Excite's footprint in the marketplace to be a sense of discovery and fun, yet anchored to a sense of utility. We've finished the cocktail-party conversation of the Web's growth. Today's big question is, what are you accomplishing?
Will the supersites be owned by traditional media?
The biggest question mark with Disney/Infoseek and NBC/Snap! is the cultural fit. If a big media company owned a majority stake in Excite a year ago, we wouldn't have had the same success - we'd have had the brakes put on us. When it comes to decisions, we get whatever data is available and go. If your chances of being right are very small, because there's no history to guide you, don't try to be right - try to be quick and flexible. Right or wrong, keep moving - and get big fast. We live by the saying "Go big or stay home": Do it now, or you shouldn't have come to the game.
It's pay-to-play for old media?
In terms of the Web, big media are beginning to acknowledge the defects of trying to do it internally. Grabbing onto the people who've built it successfully, from dirt, makes for better partners. We drink a different kind of Kool-Aid.
How does this translate to carving up the Web?
The final irony of the Web is that its next phase of growth will depend on the values of traditional media. The reach wars in television ended decades ago, but it hasn't stopped them stealing audiences from one another based on content. And after we've divided up all the eyeballs through cable, set-top boxes, broadband, and so forth, the differentiating factor between an Excite and a Yahoo! will be content. Once revenues are high enough, Excite will have Mick Jagger in our chat rooms during a Rolling Stones tour, while nobody else does.
But how does today's Web measure up in terms of content?
First, "content" is the most misused catchall word on the Web. When I take in a stock feed, is that content? If I'm selling a golf book for Amazon.com on my golf channel, is that content? The Web does a very good job - or at least the portals do - of manipulating feeds so that the 85 percent of the population that wants news, sports, weather, stock quotes, horoscopes, TV listings, and local movies gets updated formats that work. The analysis behind the news? We haven't done a good job of bubbling it up. The Web is still about the overload of information. And frankly, I'm not interested in getting commentary from the Web right now - I get my commentary mindlessly digesting articles on airplanes. But a compression of content and raw data that were linked would be very valuable.
Getting big fast and trying to finally turn a profit - are these the least or most of your worries?
Most of my concerns are internal. Getting people embraced by the culture and steeped in their job function moves slow when you're adding three employees a week. And because we're hustling to the next deal so quickly, we haven't done well with leveraging our mistakes to improve the business. The trick is to take a compressed sense of history and disgorge it. On the other hand, take our Netscape deal - it's a two-year deal, and we're two months into it. We could conduct a post-mortem on the negotiation.
The hyperventilating market hasn't seemed to curb your appetite for new partners. How do you separate perception from reality?
I try to be a voice of practicality. Remind people that though they might get quoted in The Wall Street Journal three times a week and they're only 26 years old, it's not a bad idea to ask themselves, "Would you want the product to turn out this way? Is it best of breed?" At the same time, you can end up breathing your own exhaust a little too frequently.
A hard transition from the outdoor life to the city of bits?
TV was very SWAT-team oriented - 10 guys arriving in Africa's Ituri rain forest and you have nine days of shooting budgeted at US$75,000 a day. The clock's ticking, everything centers on urgency. It turned out to be an appropriate training ground and helped me bleach out corporate-style decisionmaking.
Excite's market cap is around $2 billion. Have you earned it?
I don't think about it much, frankly. I try to come in, switch the lights on, do as much as I can each day, then switch the lights off. And come back the next day. Whether our market cap should be one, two, or eight billion doesn't matter. It's not my measure, it's Wall Street's.
