Omni Online

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

~ the obituary ~

Omni Online closed in March 1998. I got my first dial-up connection that same year, on a modem that was still counting in kilobits, which means the two of us overlapped by a few months at the outside and never met. By the time I had any idea what a webzine was, this one had been switched off and the people who had run it were working somewhere else.

The print magazine came first and was genuinely strange. Bob Guccione and Kathy Keeton launched Omni in October 1978 on Penthouse money, and it ran hard science reporting next to original science fiction, printed on expensive paper with art direction nobody else in the category was paying for. It also kept a standing sideline in UFOs. At its best it sold more than 700,000 copies a month. Ellen Datlow edited its fiction from 1981 onward and turned it into one of the better-paying short story markets in America.

Omni started living online long before it stopped living on paper. There was an Omni area on CompuServe from September 1986, a full decade before the web version, and an America Online presence from 5 September 1993. When the print edition was suspended after the Winter 1995 issue, with a couple of quarterlies trailing into the following year, the magazine did not fold. It moved. Omni Internet launched on 15 September 1996 as a standalone commercial magazine with no paper edition behind it, which almost nothing of its stature had tried.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

The thing Omni Online got right is the thing that took the rest of the industry another fifteen years to concede: if you want writing worth reading, you have to pay for it, and the price does not drop because the words are being delivered down a phone line. Datlow went on buying original fiction at professional rates for the web edition at a moment when the going rate elsewhere was exposure.

The thing it got wrong was everything about the money coming in. The 1996 web had no advertising market to speak of and no payment rail a reader would tolerate. The magazine was correct about the medium roughly four years before the medium could return the favor.

~ what came after ~

Keeton died in September 1997 of complications after surgery, and she had been the engine of the whole operation since 1978. General Media was losing money across the business. The site was closed in March 1998, and the last piece of fiction it published was Howard Waldrop's "Mr Goober's Show". Some accounts put the final switch-off in April, which is the sort of disagreement you get when a shutdown is a budget decision rather than an announcement.

Then came the part that still annoys people who were there. General Media pulled the Omni archives off the internet entirely in 2003, so eleven years of science writing and a decade of commissioned fiction simply stopped resolving. Copies have been reassembled since by volunteers and by the Internet Archive, but the publisher's own position was that the back catalog was not worth the hosting.

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