Office Pirates

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

~ the obit ~

This site was written for one specific room, an American open-plan office with a boss walking past behind you, and the reader was supposed to be hiding the tab. In 2006 I was a university student in Ankara with ttnet broadband at home. The cubicle the entire joke depended on was still ahead of me, and by the time I did sit in one the genre had moved to youtube anyway.

Time Inc. launched it on 22 February 2006 with almost no promotion, hoping the thing would spread by word of mouth. Mark Golin ran it, coming over from Maxim and Details, which tells you the register they were aiming for. The content was videos, blogs, downloads and short pieces about the life of a young man stuck at a desk, some of it filmed inside Time Inc.'s own headquarters in Manhattan.

The company itself found it strange. Jon Fine at Business Week called it Time's newest and strangest launch, and in the same stretch called it bizarre and freakish and entirely un-Time Inc, reacting to the fact that a magazine publisher built on Sports Illustrated and People had just put out a site whose whole posture was contempt for the employer. It had five full-time staff and two advertisers on day one.

Business Week also called the ending in April, when it pointed out that a launch this cheap gets either quick profit or a fast exit. It got the second one. On 24 August the daily feature called the Last Thought of the Day went out as the Last Thought Ever, and the site was switched off on 1 September, redirecting whoever still arrived to Sports Illustrated.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The target was men aged 21 to 34 procrastinating at work, which in 2006 was a demographic every advertiser wanted and nobody had a clean way to reach. Maxim had them on paper. Time Inc. wanted them on a screen they were already looking at for eight hours a day, and the office-themed wrapper was the trick for getting past the part where a reader has to explain what they are doing.

Most of the site was reader-supplied. Jokes, a Hate Nook, a running What's for Lunch, a Biggest Jackass submission form. That is a cheap way to fill a site and it is also the correct way to build one for this audience, since the funniest thing about an office is always the specific office, and only the person sitting in it knows what that is.

~ what really happened ~

Eleven million page views in a month is a real number. It is not a rounding error and it is not a failure. The problem was that Nielsen//NetRatings and Media Metrix, the two panels that told advertisers who existed, could not see it at all, and an audience an ad buyer cannot verify is an audience an ad buyer will not pay for.

Ned Desmond, who ran Time Inc. Interactive, wrote in the internal memo that the site was off to a good start and still faced a long road. Ann Moore, the chief executive, put it more bluntly later on, saying it was not doing badly and was killed because it was never going to be really big. Both statements are the same statement. A public company measures a new property against the size of the company, not against its own trajectory.

~ the funny part ~

Time Inc. announced in the same breath that online humor was coming back early the next year, out of Sports Illustrated. So the lesson taken from the experiment was not that the idea was wrong, only that it needed to hang off a brand that already had an audience. That is the opposite of what a site like this needs, and it is why the Sports Illustrated version is not remembered either.

The other thing worth keeping is the timing. Office Pirates died on 1 September 2006. YouTube had been open for about eighteen months by then and was months away from the Google purchase, and the exact audience Time Inc. could not measure was already there, watching each other's office videos for free, on a platform that never needed to justify itself to a ratings panel.

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