The Spot

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

~ the eulogy ~

the spot was finished before i had a modem. it ran from june 1995 to july 1997 and i came online in 1998, into a turkish web that was still mostly free hosting and forums, so this one belongs entirely to the reading pile. it is worth a grave anyway, because almost everything people now do on the internet for a living was tried here first and then abandoned for a decade.

scott zakarin was a filmmaker working at fattal & collins, an advertising agency in los angeles, and in 1995 he talked his employers into paying for a website that was a television show. the site went up on 7 june. it followed five young people renting rooms in a beach house in santa monica called the spot, played by a rotating cast of actors, and the entire narrative was delivered as diary entries.

that choice is the whole invention. there was no video worth streaming in 1995 and nobody pretended otherwise, so the story arrived as text with photographs, posted almost daily, and each housemate wrote their own version of the same evening. you got the argument from four sides and worked out for yourself who was lying. that is a structure television cannot do and a novel does slowly, and it fell out of a technical limitation rather than out of anybody's theory.

readers wrote in and the characters wrote back, in character, from addresses that belonged to the characters. the housemates turned up on the site's message boards to argue with people about their own behavior. a serious number of readers could not work out whether any of it was real, and some of them went to santa monica to look for the house.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was actually doing ~

strip the fiction out and the spot is a group blog with a comment section and an email list, built four years before anybody had those words. the diary entry as a unit of publishing, and under it an audience that treats the writer as somebody who will answer. the whole apparatus of personal publishing on the web shows up here fully formed and dressed as a soap opera.

it also worked out the money faster than the medium did. banner advertising paid for part of it and product placement paid for the rest, with brands written into what the housemates drank and wore. that was 1995. it won what was then the biggest prize the web had, the cool site of the year award, handed out at the hollywood roosevelt hotel in front of an industry that had just noticed the internet existed.

~ what went wrong ~

in the spring of 1996 zakarin sold his stake to minority investors who wanted to build a network rather than a show. intel led a $7 million round and american cybercast was spun out of the agency. zakarin was fired from his own creation not long after, over the usual disagreement about what the thing was for.

the money then went into launching three more series at once, among them eon-4 and the pyramid, none of which had the spot's audience and all of which had its costs. a company with one working show was now carrying four. american cybercast filed for bankruptcy in 1997, the site was picked up and run on a reduced budget by new owners, and the last original episode was posted at midnight on 1 july 1997.

~ the long tail ~

the archive stayed up for roughly two more years with the message boards still running, which means people kept talking about characters who had stopped existing. the domain has changed hands repeatedly since. web-original episodic fiction did not come back seriously until broadband and youtube made video cheap, by which point everyone had forgotten that the format's first hit was written entirely in the first person and won its awards on prose.

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