Inside.com

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

~ the obituary ~

inside.com never reached me. it was a US media-industry trade product priced for new york editors and los angeles agents, not for a turkish reader on a 56k line. but the dot-com obituary list it sits on is one i have spent a lot of time reading.

the site launched in may 2000 under powerful media. kurt andersen was the public face. michael hirschorn ran the editorial. the pitch was inside-baseball reporting on the media business and the entertainment industry, sold as a $199-a-year subscription. raising the money was easy that year. they got $12 million from jim cramer and flatiron, then another $23 million on top.

the readership never showed up at the size the cap table needed. a few thousand paid subscribers was the high mark. a biweekly print magazine launched in december 2000 to broaden the brand. steven brill bought the whole operation in april 2001, killed the print edition the same week, cut about fifty staff. the website was shut down by october 2001, somewhere in the bottom half of the bust.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

look, the founding pitch was not crazy on paper. trade publications had survived in print for a century by selling expensive subscriptions to people whose companies would expense them. that whole variety and hollywood reporter shelf. inside.com tried to do the digital version of that, paywalled and faster than the print weeklies. the timing was the problem. the dot-com peak meant the company raised on web-scale assumptions and then ran on trade-publication economics. the math did not connect.

~ how it actually ended ~

brill bought inside.com to fold it into his own contentville and brill media holdings, then decided the print magazine was a cost he could not justify. the layoffs happened within days. the website limped a few more months. by october the operation was wound down, almost in lockstep with the rest of the dot-com bust media cluster (the industry standard and suck closed inside the same window). brill turned out the lights and the brand passed quietly through several other owners across the next decade.

~ what got buried with it ~

the awards were real while it lasted. inside.com took a webby for best news site and a golden satellite for best internet site in its short run. the writing was good. the subscriber base was just too narrow for the cost structure. the larger lesson, if there is one, is that the first paid digital media product priced at print-trade rates ran a real-time test of whether the dot-com web could carry the paywall yet, and the answer in 2001 was not really.

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