My 'Internet Life' - And Death

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2002 by Barry Golson

Byline: BARRY GOLSON

A little over six years ago, I accepted the most interesting challenge of my career: to launch (or, more properly, to relaunch) a consumer magazine about the Internet. Ziff Davis, then a powerhouse technology publisher, had just struck a licensing deal with Yahoo!, then a promising Web directory, to plant a new logo on its modest (100,000 circ) two-issue-old quarterly, ZD Internet Life. I was hired to turn it into a monthly magazine. On July 1, after a fabulous ride, and with a paid circulation of 1.1 million, I was told the magazine would be folded.

We had lots of readers but too few advertisers. Pretty much the story of the Internet itself - more popular than ever, only no one can figure out who's paying the bills. We weren't a new-economy book. Because we at YIL had stuck to our surfing, reporting on the Net's resources and culture rather than its addled business schemes, we thought we had a good chance. But our bills came due, too.

Lessons learned? I was executive editor of TV Guide from 1990 to 1995, so I had a perch at the two largest magazines covering two enormously influential mediums. And while TV Guide's not in the best of health these days, either, YIL's decline was a lot more precipitous. It's the Internet, Jake.

I honestly was puzzled when people first asked, "Why a magazine about the Internet?" How could there not be? Why a magazine about TV, or about music, or about movies? If we'll read - in print - about the relatively few channels, albums, and movie releases, how about the millions of sites and services on the Web, not to mention the changing ways we access it, the issues it raises, and the changes it creates in people's lives? It made enough sense that at least a dozen competitors sprang up. But we had a great logo, editorial independence from Yahoo.com, and a consistent vision - so we cheerfully fought them all off.

With covers ranging from our "Top of the Net" best-sellers to William Wegman's weimaraners ("On the Net, no one knows you're a dog"), the magazine struck a nerve with readers. We were Adweek's this and Ad Age's that and were redesigned by Robert Priest. Our aspirations went beyond reporting on best health or travel sites to something resembling the Rolling Stone or Esquire of the Net - thus, in our flush years, world-class fees for world-class writers on politics, privacy, and ethics. In the traditional bow to advertisers, we had fashion shoots tied to digital culture.

Service nevertheless remained the core mission, and our circulation shot up between 1996 and 2000. We became profitable in 1999 and then more profitable in 2000. While Maxim maxed, and Oprah O'd, YIL came in a bit under the radar, pulling circulation gains almost as great, certainly the fastest-growing magazine of its type, ever.

But what, exactly, was its type? Though the tech and dot-com advertisers flocked to us, we had trouble fitting traditional advertisers' preconceptions: "Are you a service guide? A lifestyle book? A tech book?" Yes, yes, and not really. It didn't matter that YIL's demos - household income, education - were higher than Vanity Fair's or GQ's. What mattered was, "What slot did we fit?" Readers didn't have that trouble. I'd been to lots of focus groups, including ones for Playboy and TV Guide, but the ones we commissioned for YIL showed as satisfied a bunch of readers as I'd ever seen; they got the book and played it back to us. But we were a difficult category for Madison Avenue, with no other titles in our niche. Or our swath.

None of this was critical while the Great Bubble floated benevolently above us. When the POP! came in April 2000, we didn't panic. Group publisher Jim Spanfeller had made some nice inroads into traditional advertisers, and, besides, we weren't about the business of the Internet, but about its people. So when The Industry Standard went under, we sympathized, but we didn't think it was about us. But the larger truth is, it was about us. We, or at least our company, Ziff Davis, were as much a part of the double-talking, EBITDA-happy, option-hoarding, Netspeak debacle that overtook the rest of the Internet sector.

By the time YIL got traction, ZD had been bought and flipped twice, once by a buyout-leverage outfit, then by Softbank, whose CEO, Masayoshi Son, announced that ZD's magazines were part of his 300-year-plan and that he "loved" us all. That was soon followed by the dismemberment of the company and a dispersal of its publishing, Internet, TV, and conference units in different directions to different owners (including the sale of the magazines' own Internet sites to a separate company). The visionaries had already left, cashing in their options, and this was now followed by an exodus of the corporate execs who had concurred in the dismemberment, cashing in even more options - some worth tens of millions of dollars. (Disclosure: I've been a party to a lawsuit disputing Softbank's handling of its employee stock options.)

Our publishing unit was purchased by yet another buyout-leverage firm, Willis Stein & Partners, which installed a new CEO, Jim Dunning, promising us remaining publishers and editors sincere support and, of course, untold riches if we just hung in there. Then NASDAQ and the tech market began to tank. As the magazines' budgets began to be cut back, a straight-from-central-casting Internet "consulting firm" was hired to help create, at a reported budget of $50 million, an Internet "presence" - after the Internet bubble burst - that no editor agreed with or understood. (Twentysomething consultant to editor: "And what should a surfer feel when your new site is operationalized?") That was followed by the firing of Jim Spanfeller, architect of our magazine's growth. When the invoices for all those white-board presentations began to come due, Dunning closed a couple of titles and shopped around a couple of others. As he was about to sell YIL and the game titles to David Pecker, of American Media (see sidebar), Dunning was himself fired amid acrimonious personal charges and countercharges.