Pop.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

pop.com sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. by 1999 i was in a turkish high school with a 33.6k modem at home and a superonline dial-up account that charged by the hour, and the idea of streaming a one-to-six-minute celebrity comedy video on demand was a thing being designed for a country i did not live in. the broadband cable assumption that pop.com was being built on was an american assumption first. it would not arrive in turkey until ttnet rolled out adsl meaningfully in 2002 or 2003.

the venture was announced in october 1999. ron howard had pitched brian grazer on a short-form online video idea; the two of them then walked it over to jeffrey katzenberg, who looped in steven spielberg and david geffen on the dreamworks side. imagine entertainment and dreamworks skg formed a fifty-fifty joint venture. paul allen's vulcan ventures put in $50 million. the company set up in a glendale warehouse that also housed shrek animators, hired around 80 to 125 employees, and incorporated with 250 million shares so that talent like eddie murphy or jim carrey could be paid in equity rather than cash.

the plan was to publish original short-form video on demand, one-to-six-minute pieces called "pops" with an emphasis on comedy and celebrity participation. steve martin and jerry seinfeld signed up for projects, and ron howard's daughter bryce dallas howard worked on early content. nothing ever publicly launched. the company spent its first year producing pilots and arguing about whether the audience for short-form celebrity video on broadband actually existed yet.

the nasdaq peaked on march 10 2000 at 5048 and started its long fall. dot-com valuations evaporated through april and may. paul allen's enthusiasm for the project went with them. talks opened with ifilm, an independent film portal that had its own short-video model, to merge or sell. the talks broke down on a friday in late september 2000. the following monday katzenberg and grazer dissolved pop.com. most of the staff were laid off that week. up to sixty in-production projects were left in limbo.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the bet that did not work ~

the assumption behind pop.com was that broadband would be ubiquitous in american homes by 2001 and that the entertainment audience would want short-form celebrity content delivered through a browser plugin rather than through television. the first half of that prediction was off by several years. cable broadband penetration in the us was still under 10% of households in late 2000. the second half was eventually right, but it took youtube in 2005 and ten more years of bandwidth growth to actually arrive.

the celebrity-equity model was the other piece. pop.com wanted to compensate famous comedians and actors in stock rather than cash, on the theory that the eventual ipo would make everyone rich. once nasdaq broke and the ipo window closed, that pitch stopped working overnight. the talent had no incentive to keep delivering content for paper that was losing value every week.

~ what it preceded ~

jeffrey katzenberg made the same bet twenty years later with quibi, a $1.75 billion short-form mobile-only video service launched in april 2020 and shut down in october of the same year. the symmetry is too clean to ignore. same producer, same short-form video pitch, same six-month-to-twelve-month death window. broadband worked the second time. the audience problem did not.

ifilm survived the dot-com winter and was eventually acquired by viacom in 2005 to become spike.com. atomfilms, the other contemporaneous short-video portal, merged with shockwave.com. the short-form online video category did not actually emerge for another five years through user-generated content on youtube rather than studio-produced "pops." the celebrity-driven version of the idea kept failing because the audience never wanted curated short comedy from professional creators at the volume the economics required.

~ the long tail ~

pop.com is barely on the public web. the wikipedia entry is short. most coverage lives in 2000-era variety and hollywood reporter archives that are now behind paywalls. fast company ran a long retrospective in april 2020 framing it as "the quibi before quibi," which is the framing that mostly stuck. it is one of the cleaner examples of a project that was correct about the future but wrong about the calendar.

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