Urban Box Office

» see ubo.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Urban Box Office was sold to investors as a demographic. The company's own language for it was the urban mindset, which was meant to cover Black and Hispanic audiences plus anybody else who cared about the music and the clothes, and in 1999 that framing was worth more than a product. Money arrived before the sites did.

It was founded that year by Adam Kidron, a British record producer, alongside the film producer George Jackson and a lawyer named Frank Cooper. What they built toward was a network rather than a site: hiphop.com, Latinflava, UBO Sports, Womanhood, Urban Music Matrix, and a flagship portal called IndiePlanet that finally launched in February 2000 after missing five deadlines.

The staff went from fifty people to two hundred and fifty and then to around three hundred and fifty. A lot of them were in their early twenties and in their first job, some earning six figures, and Kidron made a point of letting the people who made things keep the rights to what they made. That part was real, and it is the part worth remembering, because everything downstream of it was a funding schedule.

None of this reached me except as weather. I was sixteen, in high school in Turkey, reading about a bubble on the other side of the planet through a modem, and the crash that actually rearranged my country arrived four months later and was a currency, not a stock index. February 2001 is the date people my age in Turkey remember. November 2000 belongs to somebody else's economy.

~ the case file ~

~ the money ~

Over forty million dollars went in across less than two years. It bought office space in Manhattan, a large payroll of people who had to be trained on the job, and a set of properties that were still being assembled while the burn ran. The retrospectives put the total destroyed at closer to seventy-five million once everything was counted.

George Jackson's death in February 2000 removed the person who had been holding the ambition together. He had a stroke in a cab on his way home from the office, less than a month after telling the staff his life story on his birthday, and he was forty-two. After that the company had funding pressure and no center.

~ the day it died ~

In October 2000 an investor declined to go through with a stock purchase it had committed to. For a company burning what UBO was burning, that was the end of the runway inside a single month. On 2 November 2000 it filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition in the Southern District of New York, and the plan of reorganization was not confirmed until 28 November of the following year.

The closing detail from the accounts of people who were there: Kidron needed a multimillion-dollar loan just to pay severance, and someone had to walk employees through how to file for unemployment, because for many of them this had been the first job and nobody had ever explained the other side of one.

~ what got buried with it ~

The argument UBO made was correct and about a decade early. There was an audience, it was underserved, and it would pay attention to something built for it rather than at it. What did not exist yet was the delivery: no broadband worth the name, no video that played without a fight, no way to make advertising on a music site pay for three hundred and fifty salaries.

ubo.net does not resolve. The properties were sold off or abandoned in the bankruptcy and none of them came back under the old name. When the same idea did work, it worked on other people's platforms, which is not the network anyone was raising forty million dollars to build in 1999.

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