NBCi

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

~ the obit ~

NBCi was the kind of object that only made sense if you watched NBC. that already excludes everywhere outside the united states. in turkey in 2000 i had heard of NBC the way a teenager hears about cnn international, as something on the cable package my house didn't get. NBCi never crossed my orbit. i learned about it later as a footnote to the dot-com bust.

NBC launched it in 1999 by buying snap.com to be the portal and xoom.com to be the homepage host, with a webmail acquisition glued on top for the inbox. the IPO closed at $76 a share on november 30 1999. the pitch was that NBC's tv-network audience would graduate to NBCi the way the prior decade's cable subscribers had graduated to AOL.

the pitch did not survive the ad market. by spring 2001 NBC's CFO said the quiet thing out loud: the portal strategy didn't make sense, and they wanted to wind down what was left. on april 9 2001 NBC announced it was buying back the public shares and closing NBCi. half of the 370 employees were laid off the following week. the offices closed and nbc.com reverted to being a tv-show promo site.

NBCi sits in the rubble pile next to pets.com and webvan, but with a slightly different shape. nbci was an old-media company, not a startup that ran out of money trying to bolt on a new-media business at the exact moment the new-media business stopped being worth bolting onto. NBC paid for the experiment with one tv network's worth of cash and pulled the plug as soon as the bill came due.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

NBC was late to the web. by 1999 disney had go.com (also dead), CBS had a clutch of sport sub-sites, NBC had a brochure page. so they did what tv networks did at the time. they wrote a big check and held a press conference. snap.com brought a search portal and xoom.com brought a million personal homepages. the new entity was NBCi, which managed to sound modern in 1999 and dated by 2002.

~ how it actually ended ~

march 2001 was when the ad-revenue forecast hit. internet ad spending had gone off a cliff. NBC's CFO publicly said it didn't make sense to keep pursuing the portal strategy. on april 9 NBC made a tender offer to buy back the public shares of its own internet division at $2.19 each. the IPO had closed at $76. the gap between those two numbers is roughly the entire valuation lesson of the dot-com bust in one chart.

~ the long tail ~

the URL that survived was the URL that had always existed. nbc.com became a tv-show promo site again, the same thing it was before the portal experiment, which means NBC ended up exactly where it started after spending hundreds of millions to find out. the assets got sold off in pieces. xoom.com was eventually reused by paypal for international remittances, completely unrelated to the original homepage product. snap.com became a domain squat and e-mail.com still does what its name says, just for someone else.

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