The Industry Standard

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

~ the obituary ~

in 2000 i was a teenager in ankara, getting online through a dial-up modem that tied up the phone line, and the internet economy was something i read rumors about, not a thing i had money in. the industry standard was a thick american magazine about exactly that economy, printed weekly in san francisco for the people who were inside the boom. it was never going to land on a newsstand near me. i met it the way most of the world did, years later, as a story about how loud and then how quiet that era got.

the magazine launched in 1998. john battelle, who had come out of wired, built it as the newsmagazine of the internet economy, and idg published it. its timing was perfect in the most dangerous way. the late 1990s were the peak of the dot-com gold rush, when every startup with a website and a logo was raising and spending venture money, and a lot of that money went straight into advertising. the industry standard was where those ads landed.

in 2000 it became almost absurdly successful. it sold more advertising pages that year than any other magazine in america, beating titles that had been around for generations. the company was valued at something like two hundred million dollars in a financing round that spring. and every dollar of it sat on top of the same bubble. the magazine was not just covering the dot-com boom, it was financially made of it, so when the bubble burst there was never any chance it would outlive what it was reporting on.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

for a stretch the industry standard felt like the center of its world. if you wanted to understand what the internet was supposedly about to do to every industry, this was the weekly that explained it, with the confidence and the page count to match. that confidence was the product. advertisers paid to sit next to the magazine that seemed to know where the future was going, and readers paid to feel like they were standing where the smart money stood.

~ the day it died ~

the crash through 2000 and 2001 took the advertisers first. the startups that had filled the magazine ran out of money and stopped buying pages, and a magazine that lived on those pages had nothing to fall back on. it lost more than fifty million dollars in its final year. in august 2001, after a last-ditch attempt to raise emergency money failed, the parent company went bankrupt and the print magazine stopped. it had documented the boom in real time and then went down in the same wreck, on the same schedule, for the same reasons as the companies it had covered. idg later tried the name again online, but the thing that mattered, the fat weekly that defined the era, was already gone.

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