Automatic Media

» see automaticmedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Three of the websites this company owned already have graves on this site. Each of those obits ends in the same place, with a parent running out of money in June 2001. This is the parent.

Nobody was ever a user of Automatic Media. It had no front page worth visiting and no product carrying its own name. What it had was a balance sheet holding two webzines that had each spent the late nineties being more admired than profitable, and the merger was an attempt to keep both alive by cutting the cost of running them in half.

It was formed in July 2000, right after internet investment stopped. Suck.com and Feed went in together with four million dollars of venture money from Lycos Ventures behind the combination. The reasoning was that two small magazines with overlapping readers could share the parts of publishing that are not writing, and that a low staffing count was survivable where a large one was not.

This was written for an audience that had opinions about Wired magazine, and in Turkey in 2000 that audience was very small. I came to all of it later and through the archive, the way most people did. The distance here is not really regional anyway. It is that Automatic Media was a corporate structure, and corporate structures do not have readers, they have creditors.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it held ~

Suck.com was the daily column that had been running since 1995 and had spent five years being the smartest cynical voice about the web while living inside the companies it was making fun of. Feed was the New York end, essays about culture and ideas, founded in May 1995 by Stefanie Syman and Steven Berlin Johnson. Between them the readership was over a million.

The company also picked up alt.culture, a reference site, and then built one thing of its own. Plastic.com launched in January 2001 as a community link aggregator with a staff of four, Joey Anuff of Suck in the editor's chair. It was the only original venture Automatic Media ever got as far as shipping, and it turned out to be the one that outlived it by a decade.

~ the eleven months ~

The math never had time to work. A merger built to reduce costs still needed advertising revenue to cover what was left, and through late 2000 and into 2001 web advertising was in free fall. By the spring the company was looking for more financing in a market where nobody was writing checks for editorial websites at any price.

The subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy citing an inability to secure additional financing, which is the flattest possible description of what happened. Both magazines told their staffs they were done. On 8 June 2001 Suck.com put up a notice reading Gone Fishin' and published nothing after it, and Feed closed in the same wind-down. Eleven months from formation to end.

~ what outlived it ~

Plastic kept going on nothing. Several editors stayed on and worked for free after the parent folded, and on 2 November 2001 the site was sold for thirty thousand dollars to Carl Steadman, one of Suck's original founders, who ran it as sole owner. It survived until February 2011, which means the child outlasted the parent by nine and a half years on a budget of volunteers.

Automatic Media itself left nothing behind with its name on it, which is normal for a holding company and still slightly bleak. The domain has been picked up by an unrelated business whose copyright line reads 2024 and which has no idea what it is standing on. If you want to know what the company was, you have to read the three obits underneath it.

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