Believe The Hype

Believe the Hype: Steven Johnson on the
great Web backlash

"At first he [Bill Gates] took it very badly" reports the Read Me column in Slate, announcing its decision to "chicken out" and remain free . "Bill, um, Mr. Gates, we countered, as you are aware from the theories of advanced cyberphilosophers, information wants to be free. 'Never mind what information wants,' he bellowed. 'What about what I want? I want that 20 bucks.'"
Anyone who has spent time over the past few years aloft in the bright, buoyant dirigible of the high-tech financial markets knows that the digital world is primed for a sinking spell. With P-to-E ratios edging towards infinity, and venture capital tightening up, it's no wonder the chorus of doomsayers grows louder every month. Some would even say they're overdue. (Remember the General Magic IPO? The search engine bubble?) An occasional backlash is not necessarily a bad thing, of course -- even to the industries that are lashed out against. There's something organic, something redemptive, in the cycles of hype and counter-hype, like the wilderness fires that scatter seeds of renewal while burning down the forest itself. The hype builds up enough working capital to experiment productively, and then the inevitable backlash weeds out all the non-starters.
Seen against this larger context, Don Clark's page one story in The Wall Street Journal this week arrives like a bucket of Liquid Drain-o poured on newly-sprouted sod. There had already been a low murmur of discontent on the business wires over the past few months: Wired's schizoid bid to go public, Spiv's identity crisis, Slate's extended flirtation with charging subscription fees. But with Clark's story, the backlash finally reached critical mass. "Reality hits the internet," the subhead read. "Too many companies vie for too few customers and advertising dollars." After an extended opening section probing through the wreckage of Spiv ("a story about the overblown expectations for a new medium") Clark struck the keynote in no uncertain tones: "After two years of hype, the Web isn't working for most of the people who had hoped to build a lucrative electronic publishing industry."
These are fighting words, by any measure. You can almost hear the wallets slam shut behind them. But is there any merit to the Journal's glum prognosis? The list of casualties certainly seems to justify the apocalyptic tone. With so many early-adopters in trouble, how could the conclusion be anything other than dire? As it turns out, though, Clark only gets the story half right: the Web publishing world is due for a backlash, but not for the reasons Clark describes. To understand this, we need to pause for a second, and reflect back on the Web's original great expectations, from the now-distant days of Mosaic and HTML 1.0.
The first wave of online publishing hype -- the one that crested in late '95 -- was never about get-rich-quick-schemes or overnight billionaires. Instead, it was about ease-of-access, the emergence of a richer, more competitive publishing ecology, where smaller fish could swim alongside the multinational sharks. Even the most silicon-addled boosters weren't talking about Web publishers making out with buckets of cash. In fact, the hype invariably ran in the other direction: Web sites weren't necessarily going to be gold mines, but they were going to be insanely cheap to produce. With no distribution costs, dramatically shortened production cycles, and a relatively simple programming environment, creating a Web site would cost a fraction of what it took to launch a print magazine. You could put out a professional-looking daily publication with only a handful of staffers: an editor or two, an HTML jockey, maybe a UNIX geek if you didn't subcontract out the actual Web hosting. Even a copy editor was optional, given the "quality is job 1.1" proofreading of electronic media.
The Journal's coverage of Slate's "chickening out" had a particular edge to it, since Dow Jones is one of the few operations that has managed to successfully charge for its Web content. (One of the few not peddling porn, that is.) If you're willing to cough up the subscription fee, you can survey the astute responses to the Clark's piece currently piling up on the WSJ site -- including remarks by a number of major industry players.

The truth is most online pioneers were driven by the idea of putting out a magazine with the circulation of The New Republic and the overhead of The Baffler -- in other words, a mid-sized publication supported by a small press budget. Somewhere in that mix, of course, was the hope of turning a profit. That possibility alone was tantalizing enough, given the dismal financial track record of most mid-sized print magazines, especially the highbrow ones. But anyone who saw a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow simply didn't understand the landscape. The Web publishers weren't going to be the next Netscape -- in fact, they were barely high-tech companies at all.
And herein lies the problem with Journal's talk of the Web's "overblown expectations." Consider the sample of troubled sites that Clark submits as evidence: American Cybercast, creators of The Spot, threatening to cut back on its staff of sixty; NetGuide Live pruning its two hundred employees down to sixty-five; Total New York looking for outside work to meet its payroll of thirty full-time staffers. There's something disingenuous about trotting out these companies as a symptom of the Web's failed expectations. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Details magazine had launched ten years ago with a staff of two thousand and a burn rate of $10 million a month. Would its inevitable failure have been a sign of print media's unrealized expectations? Of course not -- it would have been a sign that Conde Nast had failed to gauge the proper scale of a print magazine operation. But when the same mistake is made on the Web, it sparks a backlash against the medium as a whole.

In "The Medium isn't the Message" Salon's David Futrelle examines the mythos of "way new journalism" and tracks its rift with print authority and conventions. "But is a journalism free of filters," Futrelle writes, "really the answer to the old media's shortcomings?"
In the end, though, the sins of the Journal piece are largely ones of omission. Ask any casual Web surfer to name the top Web publications and you'll probably get a list that looks something like this, give or take a few titles: Slate, Salon, Word, Suck, Feed, Electric Minds, Mr. Showbiz, Urban Desires. These new zines have real brand recognition, a stable community of readers, and a good measure of critical acclaim. Of these eight publications, the Journal alluded only to Slate, and that's just because Kinsley and Co. finally gave up on their subscription plans last week. The rest of the high-profile Web sites went unmentioned in the piece. It's the digital equivalent of scraping the bottom of the Nielsens barrel for a month or two, and then penning an impassioned eulogy for the sitcom. You can't judge a medium by its failures alone.
Now, it's probably true that none of the major zines are in the black yet, though the word on the street is that some of them are flirting with profitability. (Here at FEED we expect to be revenue-neutral by spring, with a little luck.) Of course, judged by the standards of the print publishing world, where magazines are rarely expected to turn a profit until their third year, the new kids on the Web still have plenty of time to prove themselves financially. But by studiously avoiding the higher-profile sites, the Journal obscures the most important point of all: the real Web success stories -- the sites that aren't filing for Chapter 11, or downsizing wildly -- have been streamlined productions from the get-go, attentive to the cost-efficiency of the online platform. For every 200-person NetGuide Live there's a Suck, launched by two Unix hackers in the HotWired basement, still chugging along with a staff of only six. Word remains a seven-person operation, while Salon -- Time Magazine's site of the year -- makes do with twenty employees. FEED happily churns out its content with a full-time staff of three. Even Slate -- supposedly the Web's 800-pound gorilla -- debuted with a fraction of the staff at American Cybercast.
Some readers may consider all this a matter of splitting hairs. So the Journal erred a little on the negative side -- surely they've published enough digital-cheerleading over the past year to make up for one downer. But the fact is that public perceptions of the Web matter a great deal, particularly at such an early stage in the medium's development. So let's set the record straight: the story here is not that the Web failed to live up to its advance hype. That you and thousands of others are reading these very words is a sign that the hype was warranted. No, the real story is that a handful of Web publishers misinterpreted the hype, by scaling their operations up to a size that would have been appropriate for a print magazine or a software company, but that made little sense for Web publishing. (It's like hiring a team of aerodynamics engineers to design a water balloon.) That these firms are now suffering for their misguided growth is regrettable, of course, but it's not cause for doomsaying about the medium itself. When the smaller, leaner operations -- the Sucks and FEEDs and Words -- start to run into difficulties, the Journal can print all the stories it wants about the great Web backlash, and we'll grudgingly accept them. Until then, though, the Web faithful still have reason to believe.
(January 16, 1997)

FEED reader Greg Bulmash writes in to say: "The same thing that makes it possible for a small-budget magazine to reach a mid-size readership also creates a more intense level of competition because the little labors of love, labors of ego, whatever, are now in direct competition with the magazines that are looking for a profit."
Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.
Our Dialog on Web Journalism from this summer, featuring Slate's Michael Kinsley, HotWired's Gary Wolf, and Word's Marisa Bowe, covered some of these issues in more detail, with Kinsley himself weighing in heavily in support of the Web's overall cost-efficiency.

Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

In "The Medium isn't the Message" Salon's David Futrelle examines the mythos of "way new journalism" and tracks its rift with print authority and conventions. "But is a journalism free of filters," Futrelle writes, "really the answer to the old media's shortcomings?"	In the end, though, the sins of the Journal piece are largely ones of omission. Ask any casual Web surfer to name the top Web publications and you'll probably get a list that looks something like this, give or take a few titles: Slate, Salon, Word, Suck, Feed, Electric Minds, Mr. Showbiz, Urban Desires. These new zines have real brand recognition, a stable community of readers, and a good measure of critical acclaim. Of these eight publications, the Journal alluded only to Slate, and that's just because Kinsley and Co. finally gave up on their subscription plans last week. The rest of the high-profile Web sites went unmentioned in the piece. It's the digital equivalent of scraping the bottom of the Nielsens barrel for a month or two, and then penning an impassioned eulogy for the sitcom. You can't judge a medium by its failures alone. Now, it's probably true that none of the major zines are in the black yet, though the word on the street is that some of them are flirting with profitability. (Here at FEED we expect to be revenue-neutral by spring, with a little luck.) Of course, judged by the standards of the print publishing world, where magazines are rarely expected to turn a profit until their third year, the new kids on the Web still have plenty of time to prove themselves financially. But by studiously avoiding the higher-profile sites, the Journal obscures the most important point of all: the real Web success stories -- the sites that aren't filing for Chapter 11, or downsizing wildly -- have been streamlined productions from the get-go, attentive to the cost-efficiency of the online platform. For every 200-person NetGuide Live there's a Suck, launched by two Unix hackers in the HotWired basement, still chugging along with a staff of only six. Word remains a seven-person operation, while Salon -- Time Magazine's site of the year -- makes do with twenty employees. FEED happily churns out its content with a full-time staff of three. Even Slate -- supposedly the Web's 800-pound gorilla -- debuted with a fraction of the staff at American Cybercast. Some readers may consider all this a matter of splitting hairs. So the Journal erred a little on the negative side -- surely they've published enough digital-cheerleading over the past year to make up for one downer. But the fact is that public perceptions of the Web matter a great deal, particularly at such an early stage in the medium's development. So let's set the record straight: the story here is not that the Web failed to live up to its advance hype. That you and thousands of others are reading these very words is a sign that the hype was warranted. No, the real story is that a handful of Web publishers misinterpreted the hype, by scaling their operations up to a size that would have been appropriate for a print magazine or a software company, but that made little sense for Web publishing. (It's like hiring a team of aerodynamics engineers to design a water balloon.) That these firms are now suffering for their misguided growth is regrettable, of course, but it's not cause for doomsaying about the medium itself. When the smaller, leaner operations -- the Sucks and FEEDs and Words -- start to run into difficulties, the Journal can print all the stories it wants about the great Web backlash, and we'll grudgingly accept them. Until then, though, the Web faithful still have reason to believe. (January 16, 1997)
FEED reader Greg Bulmash writes in to say: "The same thing that makes it possible for a small-budget magazine to reach a mid-size readership also creates a more intense level of competition because the little labors of love, labors of ego, whatever, are now in direct competition with the magazines that are looking for a profit." Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.
Our Dialog on Web Journalism from this summer, featuring Slate's Michael Kinsley, HotWired's Gary Wolf, and Word's Marisa Bowe, covered some of these issues in more detail, with Kinsley himself weighing in heavily in support of the Web's overall cost-efficiency.