Business 2.0

» see business2.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The years Business 2.0 was at its heaviest, 1999 through 2001, sit exactly on top of my dial-up years, and none of it reached me. An American business monthly on a Turkish newsstand in 2000 was an import at import prices if it was there at all, and it usually was not. What people outside the United States got of the dot-com boom, we got off the web, in English, for nothing.

It launched in july 1998 out of Imagine Media, the American publisher Chris Anderson built after selling Future Publishing and before he took over TED. The founding team was Anderson with Mark Gross and the editor James Daly. The premise was that the internet had rewritten how companies were supposed to work and that a large number of people would pay monthly to be told the new rules in an authoritative voice.

For about two years that was exactly right. In its second full year the magazine sold more than two thousand pages of advertising, which is a number that means the physical object was too thick to fold. This was the period when a business magazine could be measured by weight, and Business 2.0 was one of the heaviest.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The competitors were running the same trick at the same time. The Industry Standard and Red Herring were selling the same certainty to the same advertisers out of the same city. What set Business 2.0 apart was the angle: less coverage of who had raised what, more instruction in how the mechanics were supposed to work now. It read like a manual for a world that had not been built yet, which is a good position when the money agrees with you and an embarrassing one afterward.

Time Inc bought it in july 2001, at the bottom, and merged its own struggling eCompany Now into the title. That was a bet on a rebound. Josh Quittner took the editorship in 2002 and ran it inside Time's Fortune group, and the magazine widened out of pure technology into real estate and, on at least one cover, outer space. Circulation stayed high the whole time. Paid and verified came in at 608,328 for the first half of 2007, which is a healthy magazine by any normal reading.

~ the day it died ~

Circulation was never the problem. Advertising was, and the collapse has a specific and internal cause. Ad pages slipped 7.7 percent in 2005 and 5.1 percent in 2006, which any title can absorb. Then Time consolidated the sales staff for its business magazines into a single unit, and through september 2007 Business 2.0's pages were down 35.3 percent against the previous year. When one desk is selling both Fortune and Business 2.0 to the same buyer, the desk sells Fortune.

Time announced the closure on 5 september 2007. There had been talk of a sale and the company chose not to; Quittner put the news out himself, and the final issue was october's. Part of the San Francisco staff stayed in the building and started working for Fortune instead.

~ the inheritance ~

What Business 2.0 was actually selling, an explanation of the new economy delivered monthly by professionals, got taken apart and given away. By 2007 the same readership was reading a hundred RSS feeds updated hourly, mostly free, often written by the people the magazine used to interview. It had spent nine years explaining a shift that made magazines unnecessary, and it explained it well enough to finish itself.

The archive was folded into CNN Money's magazine pages after the closure, which is where the run sat for years, a technology monthly filed under a masthead that no longer existed. business2.com answers today with nothing behind it at all.

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