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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Network Commerce
The Seattle-based Network Commerce serves as a holding company for six sites, including the popular gaming site, SpeedyClick. After receiving $3 million in venture capital and $70 million in private placement financing, it went public last fall. Despite being No. 34 on the Media Metrix list, with some 7.3 million visitors, the stock now trades just above $5 per share, down from a high of more than $25 last December.
The reason you've never heard of Network Commerce is simple: It changed its name in May from ShopNow, another of its sites. Founded by former Microsoft executive Dwayne Walker, the company focuses on creating sites and technology for small-to-medium-sized businesses. It uses its consumer sites, such as SpeedyClick, as a source of technology to sell to its business customers, and as a place on the Web to reach customers.
The firm positions itself as a business-to-business company with a consumer component. SpeedyClick is by far its biggest attraction, accounting for more than all its other traffic combined. The site offers lighthearted polls and games like Keno, blackjack and SpeedyLotto. Players are rewarded with "SpeedyBucks," which function like frequent-flier miles and can redeemed at an auction for prizes or be used to gamble on the site.
One game asks that you fill in the end of this statement: "I'm overweight because ..." Sample answer: "I'm overweight because the refrigerator is too close to the TV." (Apparently, no one thought to include as an answer: "... because I sit in front of a computer all day playing games.")
It's cheesy, but sort of ingenious -- the site sucks you in with this money (good only at the site, of course) and even makes spending it a ploy to keep you there longer.
Vice president Hannah Cohn says Network Commerce, which bought the site last November, is trying to take what's "sticky" about it and sell it as a service to merchants trying to build traffic at their own sites.
I can see it now -- thousands of sites all giving out fake money. This could be just what the beleaguered Net business needs. Now, if only those "bucks" were redeemable for office space, engineers' salaries, server space ...
eUniverse Network
Finally, the reigning king of the unknowns at No. 13 with 13.5 million visitors is L.A.-based eUniverse Network. If you haven't heard of it, it's because, like eFront Media, it's a conglomeration of many popular individual sites that the company acquired. Focused on interactive entertainment -- games and "fun page" ` la Passthison.com -- eUniverse owns some 20 sites with everything from the well-known multiplayer gaming league site Case's Ladder to DebsFunPages.
The publicly traded company reported first-quarter revenues of $5.8 million, an increase of 187 percent over the previous year. But the stock now trades at about $5, down from a February high of $13.
Shawn Gold, co-president and chief strategic officer who just started with eUniverse two weeks ago, is a Net industry veteran who worked on the highbrow content site, Word. But Gold has a lesson for everyone who turns up their noses at eUniverse's folksy web sites like BigFatBaby.com, whose chuckle-inducing content includes "You just got mooned!" and features a photo of some fat-bottoms showing off their butt cracks, or advice on "How to wash the cat."
"I'm cynical. I'm from New York City. I've been in the Net business since 1992. I don't open jokes in my e-mail box," Gold says. "But the folks creating this content are organic to the medium. They're very close to their audiences. They're not flashy. They're from Connecticut and St. Louis -- a lot of really nice people."
And wasn't that what the Net was supposed to be about? Wasn't it supposed to bring us entertainment created by "real" people instead of the faceless "media elite" ghettoized on the pricey coasts, churning out what they think the masses want?
Maybe butt gags and silly kitty jokes are truly mass media, since they're actually created by the masses. They certainly seem to be winning the Web popularity contest. So bring on the gyrating babies' butts, I say. Up the revolution!
