Badpuppy Gay Today

Wednesday, 16 April, 1997

To look at recent setbacks that have led to the demise of prominent Web site magazines "and conclude that the Internet is not living up to its promise," says Po Bronson, author of a novel about Silicon Valley, "is like inferring that the computer industry is in trouble because nobody's buying Wang, Commodore or Kaypro."

Bronson, who has written, "The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest," speaks of such Web publications as OUT.com, the on-line version of OUT magazine which recently announced that its failure to collect advertising revenue has dictated that it must cease publishing its Web edition (the print-media version of OUT remains on newsstands). Bronson also calls attention to American Cybercast, the producer of the Web soap opera site, The Spot, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, as well as the now-defunct Politics Now, a joint venture of ABC News, the Washington Post and National Journal.

"In an odd way," Bronson says in the April 11 edition of The New York Times, "these Web casualties are an indication of the Internet's new maturity and profitability."

Engineers, computer programmers and others who once, too quickly, jumped onto the publishing bandwagon, hoping to "turn their E-mail rants into columns," did no research that would have told them that new magazines generally don't turn profits until they've published for at least five years. If they had, they would have known that USA Today, for example, waited through a decade before the widely-circulated newspaper began to make its investors money. These engineers and programmers, following promises made to them about software successes, thought they'd be able to trade 18 months of low pay and stock options and that "soon enough (they'd) get rich or move on to something new."

Many of the now-failed Web magazines conformed, according to Bronson, to methods they'd seen operative in Silicon Valley offices, renting or buying large spaces and hiring too many workers. Some of these Web magazine offices, he explains, became so large that employees no longer recognized each other in the halls.

Bronson notes that even Yahoo, "provider of a leading Internet search engine," and a company that's "been around since the beginning," only turned its first profits in the last quarter of 1996. He preaches a new "sustainable economics," using Salon as an example, an on-line magazine which has been steadily building its readership for two years, but which does not foresee recognizable profits until at least three more years have passed.

Other publications have hooked up with a small number of sponsors, and are no longer chasing after advertisers as did OUT, whose President, Henry Scott was quoted (See OUT Magazine Goes off the Web", GayToday Archives, World, March 26) as saying it was necessary for his ad-sales force to beat up advertisers in order to encourage ad placements.

"Publishers," Scott had said, "didn't have clear goals when their sites were launched."

Bronson, who takes failures such as OUT's in stride, says that the good news for the Web is that its ad revenues continue to grow. Low traffic spots have been left behind, however, in favor of approximately 100 prominent sites.

"The competition," he writes, "will help the Web because it will punish complacency." The recent glut of failures, "far from being an omen of the Web's unprofitability," will encourage the arrival of the kind of inventive spirit that's needed "and, most important, frighten away those who are only in it for the quick buck."

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