Space Cadet

Brandweek, May 1, 2000 by Roberta Bernstein

Space.com's Lou Dobbs is going where no journalist has gone before.

Back in 1997, when real-time photos were transmitted to Earth by the Mars Pathfinder, Lou Dobbs, the then-CNN heavyweight, browsed the Web for news on the cosmos. The search came up lacking. "I couldn't find broad space content," he says, "and, finding none, decided it would be a terrific thing to build."

When the CNN executive VP, who was also an architect of the network's

Internet strategy and anchor of the highly successful financial news show Moneyline News Hour With Lou Dobbs, chose to immerse himself in the dot-com world, colleagues were not surprised--and not only because of the potential financial windfall. Dobbs is not known for shirking a good media challenge.

"My experience at CNN and Time Warner and building cnnfn.com was very helpful," says Dobbs. "It made most of us unafraid of experimentation and taking risks, and helped us understand that one has to absolutely be market and user-sensitive."

Nearly a year after its July 1999 launch, space.com, a provider of space news, information, entertainment and educational content, is thick with deals. It is also waiting to see how successful its mission is.

Recent news makes space.com look, at least on paper, like a healthy contender in the world of startups; a second round of financing has been secured; a juicy deal completed with NBC; a TV campaign is breaking in May; and a national newstand magazine, Space.com Illustrated, has a planned July launch.

"We believe we've tapped into a latent interest in space that is unrequited by traditional media, and for which the Web is uniquely positioned to serve," says Dobbs. It's an interest often found among "the highest common denominator," he adds--meaning users with $75,000-plus incomes, college educations and a strong interest in technology and science.

Space.com's stated mission is to "popularize" space across a wide spectrum of users. The site is for "the stargazer, the amateur, the professional, the teacher, those in the industry, the fans of science fiction," says John Philips, vp marketing, space.com. "There's a real varied set of groups out there and we have to aggregate all the interests," he explains.

The multipronged site includes space.com Science (astronomy, the solar system), Space History, Space Imagined (books, TV, movies) and spacekids.com. It also has a daily news service with a staff of 27 journalists. Topics range from satellites that keep an eye on a Manhattansized iceberg, to the Boeing Co.'s dealings in Tokyo. Bureaus are based in Washington, D.C.; Cape Canaveral; Houston; and Pasadena.

The site's multiple-source revenue model includes online advertising--advertisers so far include Coca Cola, AT&T and Dr. Pepper--and sponsorships. Where its success may lie, however, is in content syndication. So far, the site has deals with Alta Vista, AvantGo, Brittanica and ZD Net, plus limited content syndication deals with Screaming Media and iSyndicate. It also hopes to generate money from its magazine and a retail presence that would include licensing and merchandising.

Space.com's second round of financing, to the tune of $50 million, was ponied up by original funders Venrock Associates and Greylock, plus SpaceVest, Blue Chip Venture Company, PaineWebber and NBC.

Under terms of the NBC agreement, announced in March, NBC will provide a combination of cash investment and advertising time across the NBC Television Network, NBC's 13 owned-and-operated stations, and NBC cable properties-NBC owns CNBC, operates MSNBC in partnership with Microsoft, and maintains equity interests in A&E, The History Channel and Rainbow Programming Holdings--in exchange for a minority equity stake in space.com. (Financial details were not disclosed.)

The deal opens the way for space.com's first television advertising campaign. The campaign, being launched across NBC's portfolio, consists of two :30s and two :15s with the tagline "Houston, we have a Web site," and was created by New York-based the Wolf Group. Online, space.com is running banners and badges on lifestyle-oriented sites like natgeo.com, Yahoo, Excite and Snap, and linking to key word searches (i.e. "NASA," "space shuttle," "Hubble").

Looking ahead, Dobbs says one priority is developing the site's business-to-business capability: "We'd like to become the gathering point for the space community, a place for dialog about trends in the business, communication between NASA and subcontractors. That's an extremely big area."

Space.com is the latest manifestation of a "lifetime interest" in the cosmos, Dobbs maintains. He still has a letter from NASA from when he applied to the now-defunct Civilians in Space program. It says "you'll be hearing from us at some point in the future," he says. "I'm still waiting."