Women's WIRE

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

~ the obituary ~

this one sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot remember. it launched in october 1993, five years before i had a modem, and it was built for readers i was never going to be one of. i am reconstructing it from the record rather than from anything i saw.

the record is good, though. nancy rhine and ellen pack met on the well, the berkeley conferencing system that produced half the people who built the early commercial web. rhine was a co-director there. pack had gone online for the first time in 1991 and liked it, then noticed there were almost no women in any room she entered. she posted about starting a network for women and rhine answered her.

pack raised a hundred thousand dollars from family and friends. rhine, who had taught herself to program, built the thing. it went live in october 1993 with five hundred members, reachable over telnet. by 1994 it cost fifteen dollars a month. about ninety percent of the people paying that were women, which at the time made it the only online service in america where that was true.

the detail everybody quotes is the one where a man told the founders not to bother, because there was no market for women online. it gets quoted because it was wrong in an unusually measurable way. inside three years the site was seeing three hundred thousand visitors a month.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

before the web, an online service meant a place you dialed into that had everything inside it. mail and forums and chat, with an editorial staff writing for the members. women's wire ran that full stack for a subscription, out of pack's home first and then an office south of san francisco staffed entirely by women.

what made it different from the general services was not the software. compuserve and prodigy had better plumbing and far more members. what women's wire had was a room where the default assumption about who was talking ran the other way from every other room on the network in 1993. that turns out to be a product feature, and it is the one the company kept trying to sell for the next eight years.

~ the name fight ~

they started out simply as wire, for women's information resource and exchange, on the address wire.net. wired magazine, which had launched that same year and was sitting on wired.com, decided this was too close and came after them.

the settlement was quiet and slightly generous. wired agreed to cover half the cost of moving to a new address and the founders agreed to become women's wire. rhine said afterward that they settled because fighting it would have cost money they needed for the business. it is a small story that tells you how thin the whole operation was in 1994.

~ what really happened ~

the web took the subscription apart. by 1995 the service had migrated onto compuserve and then onto the open web as women.com, which was free and paid for by advertising. marleen mcdaniel came in as president and ran that transition. rhine left in 1996 for aol. by 2000 something like eighty percent of the revenue was advertising, with hearst folded in as a partner after handing over homearts and astronet.

women.com listed on nasdaq in october 1999 under the ticker womn. priced at ten dollars, it closed the first day at eighteen and a half. that was the top. the advertising market for women's portals fell apart along with everything else, and by february 2001 the company was in merger talks with ivillage, the rival that had gone public seven months ahead of it to a much louder first day. the deal closed on 18 june 2001 at forty seven million dollars in cash and stock, which was less than women.com had been worth on paper for a single afternoon in 1999. ivillage itself lasted until 2014.

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