Syndicate Or Die

By Matt Hicks, eWEEK



It may be the winter of dot-com discontent, but you wouldn't know it from Salary.com Inc. Since last May, the year-old site has more than quadrupled its unique visitor count to 586,000 per month, vaulting Salary.com to No. 6 on Jupiter Media Metrix Inc.'s list of top career sites. The Wellesley, Mass., company even managed to raise $2.6 million in new venture backing last month, no mean feat in the current dot-com downturn.

So how did Salary.com do it? Not by taking the usual dot-com marketing tack, spending millions on offbeat Super Bowl ads or promotional mass mailings of back-flipping toy dogs. Instead, Salary.com dramatically drove traffic by syndicating its specific brand of job information—proprietary compensation data on 1,000 positions plus a search tool called Salary Wizard—to other top career sites and major portals such as Yahoo Inc. So far, Salary. com has signed up 150 syndication partners, which are generating "significant" revenue for the site in addition to big-time visitor increases, said Andy Linn, vice president of product management.

"Syndication works when you have content that adds value to [a] site," said Linn, who declined to discuss Salary. com's revenue or profit picture. "It improves the user experience, and as a syndicator of content it provides us a distribution network for our unique content."

Under pressure to find new revenues beyond online advertising, dot-com content sites are increasingly syndicating their content to other sites for a price. Syndication, experts say, offers not only a new source of revenue but also a way to quickly build traffic at a relatively low cost, particularly if e-businesses make use of a growing group of new online syndication networks. The trend even offers opportunities to non-content-driven dot-coms, which now have a chance to enrich their sites by adding syndicated content. Experts, how ever, offer a word of caution to dot-coms considering the syndication route: Always protect your brand by being selective about where and how your content appears.

There's gold in syndication

spurred on by dot-coms such as Salary.com, the market for syndicated online content is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years. Forrester Research Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., predicts the total value of content syndicated online will grow from $718 million in 2000 to more than $3.5 billion in 2005 (see chart, Page 55). While that won't make syndication anywhere near the dominant source of revenue for Web sites— advertising will continue to fill that role, according to Forrester—much more money will be made on syndication over the next few years.

Who makes most of that money, say experts, depends a lot on the type of content a site has to sell and how much leverage it can exert in the market (see chart, below left). The more valuable the content, for instance, the bigger the premiums are that sites receive through syndication, said Daniel O'Brien, an analyst at Forrester.

One e-business that's used syndication to boost revenues is online financial news source MarketWatch.com Inc. The site, which includes the well-known CBS MarketWatch.com and BigCharts.com, has seen proceeds from content licensing grow to account for about one-third of its revenues, with the rest coming from advertising, said Scott Kinney, executive vice president of licensing for MarketWatch. com, in Minneapolis. In the third quarter of 2000, about $4.2 million in revenue came from licensing fees, compared with only $1.8 million from syndication in the same quarter a year earlier, the company reported. Among MarketWatch.com's syndication customers are Datek Online Brokerage Services LLC, a subsidiary of Datek Online Holdings Corp., and ETrade Securities Inc.

Much of the jump in syndication revenue resulted from MarketWatch.com's purchase of BigCharts. com in June 1999. BigCharts.com's income was split almost fifty-fifty between sales of its content—stock quotes and financial news—and advertising, Kinney said.

In most of MarketWatch.com's 250 content licensing deals, it works directly with syndication customers, creating for them custom Web sites that incorporate a combination of content from stock quotes and financial charts from BigCharts.com as well as financial news from CBS MarketWatch.com, Kinney said. A team of 35 people works from MarketWatch.com's Minneapolis offices exclusively on licensing and syndication deals. In some cases, they host the content pages for syndication customers. In others, they download content.

For e-businesses such as Mar ket Watch.com, a big advantage to syndication is that revenue tends to be more stable and predictable than that from online advertising. Licensing agreements tend to be at least one-year contracts, if not for multiple years. MarketWatch.com charges sites a monthly fee that varies depending on a site's business model. A brokerage site may be charged based on the number of account holders, for example, while a subscription-based site will be charged based on the number of subscribers, Kinney said.

Finding deals

marketwatch.com has been more successful at syndication than most content sites, experts say. Few, so far, have been able to grab such a large percentage of revenue from syndication, Forrester's O'Brien said. Working in its favor is MarketWatch.com's concentration on financial data and news, which is highly marketable.

For other content dot-coms, such as general-interest news and features site Salon.com, syndication remains a challenge. So far for Salon.com, syndication accounts for between 5 percent and 10 percent of revenues, said CEO and President Michael O'Donnell, in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Salon.com continues to struggle to turn a profit. Salon.com reported losses of $3.5 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with a loss of $4.7 million for the same period in 1999. In December, the company cut 20 percent of its staff as part of an effort to cut expenses.

It's not surprising, then, that Salon. com continues to pursue syndication deals. O'Donnell's goal is to make syndication a more substantive part of the company's revenues—about 25 percent—to help Salon rely less on advertising. The company has two of its salespeople concentrating on syndication.

The biggest problem for Salon.com has been finding lucrative, long-term syndication deals for its content. Although the company has found particular interest from foreign publishers, such as Italian publisher Gruppo Mondadori, in the United States most of its content syndication deals have been one-time purchases of articles by print publications, O'Donnell said. The company, for example, has worked with book publishers on three compilations of Salon.com writing.

Besides chasing syndication deals themselves, Salon.com, MarketWatch. com and other e-businesses have begun to syndicate content through online syndication distribution networks such as iSyndicate Inc., ScreamingMedia Inc. and NewsEdge Corp.

Such services essentially license content and resell it to content-consuming sites, taking responsibility for online transfer of the material.

Salon.com, for instance, first started selling its content in 1997 through traditional newspaper syndicator United Media, a division of The E.W. Scripps Co. It also has worked with Web syndicators such as iSyndicate.

Working through such syndication networks can be a quick path to gaining exposure for your site and your content, Forrester's O'Brien said. Syndicators provide a ready-made base of hundreds of Web sites that will have access to the content and, in some sense, act as an outsourced sales team cultivating new business. They also handle the complexities of delivering content in various forms, from Extensible Markup Language and HTML to the many wireless protocols.

Syndication networks are not necessarily a guaranteed source of significant new revenue, however. O'Donnell said none of the syndication network relationships that Salon has entered into, for example, has generated significant revenues.

"We have deals with them, but it's not a priority," O'Donnell said.

The problem with syndicating through online networks, experts say, is that the site providing content receives only a percentage of the revenues generated from syndication deals and must compete with hundreds of other content sources vying for placement on Web sites. In ScreamingMedia's case, for instance, 70 percent of revenues go to ScreamingMedia, and 30 percent to content providers.

There can be many permutations. NewsEdge pays some content providers a flat annual fee so that it can provide customers the option of an unlimited news feed from specific sources. Sites providing content might even pay, as is the case with one of iSyndicate's services through which Web sites can post headlines from iSyndicate's content partners for free. Those headlines then include links to the content site, which pays for the extra traffic on a per-click basis.

"You can get to hundreds or thousands of sites by working through a syndicator," O'Brien said. "[But] at the end of the day, 10 solid licensing deals with volume may be worth more than a thousand smaller sites. You can do both, using a licensing staff for the largest arrangements and doing the rest through a syndicator."

In most cases, content dot-coms say it makes more sense for them to do it themselves, particularly if they're selling many types of content and can add services on top. "When we're doing a complicated project for a large brokerage or a large bank, we're designing and developing dynamic pages that change every second with new market data," Kinney said. "If we were only syndicating CBS MarketWatch.com news, then the opportunity would be much less."

Protecting the brand

whatever the arrangement, content sites must consider how syndicating their content across the Web will affect their brands and destination sites. Overexposing its content to the point that it no longer offers any unique value on its own site, or allowing its content to be represented or changed inaccurately, could damage a content provider's reputation rather than help it.

Some syndication networks give providers some control over their content. At ScreamingMedia, for instance, content providers can choose which sites have access to their content. That way, they can block competitors or avoid sites they believe may damage their brand.

All the syndicators also allow various amounts of control over how content is branded, making sure articles, for instance, are sourced. iSyndicate even has content providers that require that their logos appear on all their content shared in the network.

"Our content providers inherently trust us because they preapprove where their content will go," said Kevin Clark, CEO of ScreamingMedia, in New York. "Our content providers don't want to go to a competitor. They want to know explicitly that their content goes where it's best represented."

That doesn't mean all content sites shy away from selling information to competitors. MarketWatch.com has syndication deals with competitors to its CBS MarketWatch.com site, such as business and financial news sites TheStreet.com Inc. and Dow Jones & Co.'s WSJ.com, Kinney said. He said he doesn't believe such deals harm MarketWatch.com's destination site, partly because the competitors tend to buy stock data and charting capabilities rather than financial news. In addition, the destination site is competing on the way it presents and prior itizes news, and not all its content is shared through syndication.

"We focus hard on delivering products to those guys that are of high value and enhance the capability of their sites, and if that makes them more competitive to other parts of our business, then we accept the trade-off," Kinney said.

While syndication, if done right, can provide content dot-coms with a needed new source of revenue, increased exposure is the principal motivation for some. Consider Planet Out.com, a gay and lesbian portal that was first launched on MSN.com in 1995 and today provides its news and features for free to top portals such as Yahoo and America Online Inc.'s AOL.com, Netscape Netcenter.com, ICQ.com and Compu Serve. Those deals, said Beth Callaghan, senior director of content and programming at PlanetOut Corp., in San Francisco, help establish PlanetOut as "the gay voice of record."

So far, however, syndication is only a blip on the site's revenue radar screen, Callaghan said. PlanetOut also is using syndication networks ScreamingMedia and iSyndicate.

Syndication's value, though, isn't always best measured in direct revenues, as Salary.com learned so well. The instant exposure Salary.com gained was syndication's biggest payoff. With traffic numbers soaring, Salary.com also established itself as a destination, and that means even more opportunities for revenues and future profitability.

"If you can get more and more sites and get them to market the information in the right way," Linn said, then "it's basically limitless."

In fact, with syndication as part of their strategy, content-oriented sites like Salary.com may yet survive the dot-com winter.


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Sizing up the syndicators

Syndication, the latest tactic to extract money from content on the Web, has attracted a wide variety of online service providers, from Old Economy news services to new businesses combining content from diverse Web sites. While a shakeout seems inevitable, who survives will hinge on the quality and uniqueness of the content provided and on the syndicators' ability to quickly respond to the changing needs of subscribers. Here's a look at some of the top providers in this market.

Factiva A Dow Jones Reuters company, Factiva provides access to high-quality content, including The Wall Street Journal. Includes a good suite of software tools for integrating content with an intranet or extranet. www.factiva.com

iSyndicate One of the first Web-based content syndicators, iSyndicate has a large and diverse set of content providers. Some of the content is free, while some can cost sites thousands of dollars per month. www.isyndicate.com

Moreover Although it provides news content as do most other syndicators, Moreover also uses powerful search technology to let sites get content from industry Web sites and discussion groups. www.moreover.com

NewsEdge A syndicator that predates the Web, NewsEdge has been providing content via e-mail and online services for 12 years. As part of its service, NewsEdge employs editors who filter content by topic. www.newsedge.com

Source: eWeek Labs


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Who has the upper hand?

As syndication grows, there will be more deals between buyers and sellers of content. The following factors will be among those determining who has the most leverage for revenues in syndication deals.

Who has the unique product? The more difficult it is to duplicate certain content, services or products, the more a provider can demand in license fees and revenue shares.

Who has the largest audience? Content providers that already have a wide audience can demand more money than those that are unknown. The latter may be forced to give away content for exposure.

Who drives the customer experience? If the content provider—a popular portal, for example—shapes the way a customer acts, it can exert more bargaining power.

Source: Forrester

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Amazon to Charge Publishers To Promote Books by E-Mail

By NICK WINGFIELD and MATTHEW ROSE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Amazon.com Inc. is finding a new way to get money from book publishers, and once again potentially blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial judgments.

The Seattle-based Internet retailer recently notified publishers that it will begin to charge them as much as $10,000 per title in exchange for a better shot at having Amazon recommend their books in special e-mail promotions sent to customers. Previously, the e-mail recommendations were free to publishers and were based solely on the judgment of Amazon book editors. With the new fees, Amazon is extending a longtime practice on its Web site of allowing publishers to nominate a book and charging them if Amazon editors agree it is worthy of a recommendation.

Amazon says it will continue to recommend titles via e-mail for which it has received no fee from the publisher -- possibly confusing some customers about what are effectively advertisements and what are titles selected for purely editorial reasons. Those titles would likely include expected best-sellers, books from well-known writers or other titles Amazon's editors believe are good. Though Amazon says it will disclose which titles it received payment for, users will have to click on a hyperlink to the Amazon Web site to see which titles fall into that category. Amazon plans to begin sending the e-mails containing the paid recommendations within the next couple of weeks.

The new fees involve a program Amazon calls Past Buyer Mailings, mass e-mailings that send book recommendations to existing Amazon customers based on their purchasing history on the Web site. Amazon recommends books using various criteria, including suggesting books by authors that customers have already shown an interest in. The company may also recommend similar authors or genres, such as mysteries or autobiography, suited to a customer's tastes.

Amazon emphasizes that all of the book recommendations sent to its customers over e-mail, like many recommendations on its Web site, are selected by teams of editors. But the new arrangement could give Amazon a financial incentive to select titles for which publishers are eager to cough up a large sum to be included in e-mail promotions.

In addition to the new fee levied if publishers' nominations pass muster with Amazon editors, the publishers will be required to buy advertising on one of Amazon's pages, pushing the cost of the total package to as high as $17,000. Amazon says it will regularly reject titles it deems unworthy of promotion.

Amazon spokeswoman Kristin Schaefer described the new e-mail program as an extension of what Amazon has been doing since it began accepting placement fees from publishers in ex change for exposure on Amazon's Web site. "Now we're allowing publishers to have input as to what titles they would like to have included in those e-mails," she said.

Some publishers say Amazon should tread carefully with the new policy. Laurence Kirshbaum, chief executive of AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Time Warner Trade Publishing, says Amazon could hurt its reputation if it doesn't fully disclose that publishers are paying to get their books publicized this way. "If you don't distinguish between editorial and advertorial you could lose credibility," he says.

Amazon raised concerns among customers and media critics in 1999 when it first began charging publishers to increase their chances of receiving a featured slot on Amazon's heavily-trafficked Web site. Initially, it didn't disclose the titles for which publishers had paid promotional fees, saying that all of its recommendations were vetted by Amazon editors. Amazon later began disclosing specific titles backed by payments -- in a section reached by clicking on a hyperlink on its Books home page -- after complaints from customers. Amazon still lists those titles: Among the ones listed Tuesday were "A Painted House" by John Grisham and "Crooked River Burning" by Mark Winegardner.

Amazon executives have said that their disclosure policies are better than those of traditional "bricks-and-mortar" retailers, who also accept payments from publishers in exchange for favorable placement of books in their stores. Publishers typically pay for such placement from so-called cooperative marketing budgets, which represent by far publishers' greatest marketing expense. Every year, publishers give money to retailers -- both online and bricks-and-mortar -- based on the amount of sales they generate. The retailers can use those "co-op" funds to promote titles in various ways -- whether through print advertising, in stores or on the Web -- usually with the publishers' consent.

E-mail has become one of Amazon's most effective marketing tools. The company won't say exactly how many of the Past Buyer Mailings it typically sends out, but it has grown to be a favorite marketing technique among Amazon's publishing partners, with many publishers saying they often see significant spikes in sales following the promotional e-mails.

According to an e-mail sent to publishers, Amazon has told publishers that it will cost between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on the book, for Amazon to promote their titles through e-mail. According to the e-mail sent to publishers, Web-site fees start at $2,000 for promotions on "category" home pages and $12,000 for promotions on the more visited Amazon Books Home Page. Amazon declined to comment on the authenticity of the e-mail or the fees it charges publishers for promotions.

Some publishers say the new fees connected with its e-mail promotions will be tough to stomach. The cost of promoting a title on the Amazon Book Home page and through e-mail -- the most expensive combination -- is about 40% higher than the cost of getting a book placed in a prime location in one of the major chain bookstores, according to one publishing executive. Getting good in-store placement is one of the most effective ways of pushing a book.

Amazon's fees are "way beyond the budget," says John Oakes, publisher at Four Walls Eight Windows Inc., a 30-book-a-year New York publishing house. "It doesn't matter what you are told by Bertelsmann or Simon & Schuster; that is a significant amount of money for any publisher." It's also hard to justify the cost as the e-mail is a one-shot marketing tool, says Mr. Oakes, who says he hasn't yet been notified about the change.

The additional charges will likely make life harder for smaller publishers like Mr. Oakes with limited amounts of marketing cash. If publishers can't or won't pay to promote smaller titles, the program could hurt Amazon's ability to promote quirky books that sometimes grow into best-sellers but aren't obvious successes.

Publishers worry that the high cost of the e-mail program compared with other marketing expenses could drastically cut into their co-op budgets and hurt their ability to promote other books, especially low-selling literary titles. "It's robbing Peter to pay Paul," says one publishing executive.

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The Web Offers Radio Station A New Life After the Airwaves

By SHEILA MUTO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


Tossed off the airwaves, a Los Angeles-area radio station has found a new home on the Internet.

In August, the station's owner, media giant Clear Channel Communications Inc., sold the rights to the station's broadcast frequency. The new owner immediately switched formats, from "adult alternative" rock to Spanish-language music. But just as quickly, the station resumed playing music ranging from the Beatles to the Wallflowers at www.WorldClassRock.com (www.worldclassrock.com).

Clear Channel, which had to be talked into the experiment, is now embracing WorldClassRock as a possible model for future Webcasting efforts. After all, the station, which made a small profit in its previous life, has quickly achieved something that has eluded most Web entertainment ventures: It's making a profit on the Internet, says John J. Martin, president of Clear Channel Radio Online.

So far, the key to WorldClassRock's profitability has been Clear Channel's partnerships. Microsoft Corp. and RealNetworks Inc. pay WorldClassRock a fee to link to sites where their Internet-streaming software can be downloaded. Akoo.com Inc. gives the station a commission on the wireless Internet audio devices it sells to WorldClassRock listeners. These and other agreements generate enough revenue to keep the station in the black, Mr. Martin says.

The scale is small. People from as far away as Brazil and Germany listen to the Webcast, but only about 130,000 tune in each month. That's way below the 246,000 people who listened to the station each week when it broadcast over the air, according to Ceridian Corp.'s Arbitron.

But for Clear Channel, profits are just part of the story. WorldClassRock is serving as a laboratory to help its parent determine how Internet radio can generate revenue, what technologies work best, and how to create synergies with the company's other properties. The San Antonio company owns some 1,120 traditional radio stations, about 300 of which also broadcast over the Internet. The company also owns Eller Media, a large outdoor-billboard company; SFX Entertainment, a live-concert producer and ticket seller; and Premiere Radio Networks, which offers syndicated radio fare, including "The Rush Limbaugh Show" and "The Dr. Laura Schlessinger Program."

Clear Channel's broader Internet radio strategy includes launching several more Web-only stations this year to complement the programming on its over-the-air stations. It is significant that it's forging ahead in this area despite a ruling last month by the U.S. Copyright Office that radio stations that put their programming online must pay music royalties to record labels in addition to the royalties they already pay to music publishers.

Even with a sagging economy, Kevin Mayer, chief executive of Clear Channel Internet Group, forecasts that the company's overall online ventures -- from SFX Entertainment's online concert-ticket sales to online radio -- will be profitable by next year. Toward that end, Clear Channel announced a deal last week with Hiwire Inc., a Los Angeles company that provides the technology for inserting ads into streamed Webcasts, to deliver targeted ads to listeners of WorldClassRock. The deal gives Clear Channel an early lead in tapping into the $140 million that Jupiter Research expects advertisers to spend on streaming audio and video online by 2005.

Nationwide, there are 4,500 traditional radio stations that stream their programming online, and 500 companies that offer some kind of music online, according to BRS Media Inc., a consulting firm in San Francisco. WorldClassRock's quick success on the Web suggests that existing broadcasters have a huge advantage over most of the upstarts that launch Web-only radio stations. "Clear Channel already has the infrastructure to program and promote and drive traffic to its Web sites," says Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Paul Sweeney. "That allows them to operate at pretty low costs."

When WorldClassRock was an over-the-air station operating under the call letters KACD-FM and KBCD-FM, it had a relatively weak signal. As a result, its 60-second commercial spots commanded only about $110, according to Duncan's American Radio, a broadcast research firm in Cincinnati. But, with a staff of only 10, its operating costs were low. Its 14 to 15 minutes of commercials an hour were sold by the ad-sales staff of another Clear Channel-owned station in the area, says Nicole Sandler, now WorldClassRock's station manager and afternoon disk jockey.

When the station was sold, Clear Channel executives were at first reluctant to approve the KACD air staff's request to shift the broadcast to the Web. "They wanted to know whether our audience would stick with us," says Ms. Sandler. Approval was granted only after more than 30,000 listeners signed an online petition saying they would listen to a station broadcast over the Internet. Still, Clear Channel hedged its bets by also putting WorldClassRock on an AM frequency, even though it can be heard only by a small group of listeners and doesn't rank on Arbitron's list because there are so few.

Now that the station is operating online, Clear Channel executives won't disclose details of WorldClassRock's revenue sources or its operating expenses, including the cost of streaming its seven-day-a-week Webcast, its seven-person staff, and the rent on its Santa Monica, Calif., studio.

But clearly one of the keys to its success is its synergy with other Clear Channel properties. For instance, the company recently completed a centralized data center in San Antonio, and all of its Web sites are now hosted there. The cost of streaming appears to be minimal, in part because of the relatively small size of WorldClassRock's audience. Web radio observers say that streaming audio over the Internet can cost as little as 3.4 cents an hour per listener these days. As a result, broadcasting WorldClassRock about 130,000 times a month for 37 minutes each, the average time of each listener, would cost only about $3,000 a month.

In contrast, NetRadio Corp., which first began Webcasting in 1995, has been in the red since it went public in October 1999, even though it attracts 2.5 million unique users a month who collectively spend about five million hours tuned into its 120 radio channels. The Minneapolis company, which broadcasts only over the Net and offers a range of formats from talk to hip-hop, incurred about $12.8 million in losses on slightly more than $1.6 million in revenue during the first nine months of last year, according to its most recent federal filing.

But others may be close to following WorldClassRock into profitability. For example, Santa Monica-based KNAC.com, a heavy-metal Internet radio station, is about six months away, according to its founder and general manager, Rob Jones. Like WorldClassRock, KNAC had its over-the-air frequency sold to a Spanish-language broadcaster in 1994. It re-emerged on the Web three years later as KNAC.com. Mr. Jones says that more than one million unique listeners a month now tune into KNAC, which last year became part of closely held Enigma Digital in Santa Monica, operator of five other online radio channels. Along with banner ads and ad copy read by DJs, KNAC generates revenue by selling sponsorships for such events as online interviews with musicians and listener contests.

MusicMatch Inc. expects its two-month-old online radio venture to post a profit within a year. The San Diego company has been marketing its radio stations to the 13 million people who use its jukebox programs, software that allows users to store and play music on their computers. The company says its stations already generate about 4.5 million listening minutes a day, and send about 45,000 people daily to e-commerce sites, for which it receives referral fees. MusicMatch executives boast that they have sold a healthy number of radio sponsorships. "Instead of blanketing our airwaves with loud ads, it's more effective having a few advertisers to quietly sponsor the next couple of hours of commercial-free radio," says Bob Ohlweiler, senior vice president of business development.

Until last week, advertising revenue at WorldClassRock came from a few banner ads and e-commerce deals. Now, using Hiwire's technology, WorldClassRock plans to stream about 10 minutes of commercials each hour within the Webcast, says Ms. Sandler. Hiwire Chief Executive Warren Schlichting says that based on his company's experience so far, advertisers are willing to pay $30 to $60 per 1,000 listeners for a targeted audio commercial.

Others say it's folly to rely too heavily on streamed advertising. "The best business model is the one that offers the most nonintrusive listening experience," says Mike Wise, NetRadio's chief financial officer, noting that NetRadio runs a maximum of two minutes of commercials an hour on its Webcasts. "We will never let advertising time increase to anywhere near that of traditional radio because online listeners won't appreciate it and won't come back," he says.


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Internet Airwaves
The top Internet-only radio stations, as of October 2000

RANK/RADIO PROGRAM -- TOTAL LISTENING HOURS PER MONTH
1. NetRadio's smooth jazz -- 289,100
2. NetRadio's '80s hits -- 269,400
3. NetRadio's contemporary hits -- 267,900
4. Enigma Digital's Groove Radio's electronic dance music -- 240,100
5. Net Radio's quiet classics -- 237,000

Note: According to Clear Channel, WorldClassRock.com draws 80,000 listening hours/month and would rank 24th in this list.

Source: Ceridian's Arbitron

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All hits, all the time: Ashley Power's Web site -- Goosehead.com -- is clicking like crazy with teens

By Elizabeth Hume
Bee Staff Writer


Dot-coms come and go, but 15-year-old Ashley Power's 300,000-hits-a-day teen Web site, www.goosehead.com, has taken the entertainment industry by storm.

The site's popularity has attracted production offers from NBC, MGM Entertainment, Showtime and Disney, and a partnership with Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss.

The high school sophomore, who lives near Los Angeles, isn't fazed by all the attention. "I'm just kind of doing what I like to do," Power said.

What she "likes to do" is develop cutting-edge content for the site, which is specifically for and by teens. Her skills and talent have certainly brought her success. Last year, Power was named Entrepreneur of the Year by CosmoGirl magazine, and won a Lifetime Achievement Edgy Award from Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal's Tribeca Film Center.

Goosehead's allure seems to be Power's understanding of what interests teenagers.

"I like Goosehead because it's a really fun place to be," said Cheryl Yin, 15, of Long Beach. "Ashley's a teenager like us, so she knows what we like and what we want."

One of the site's main attractions is the edgy, low-budget teen cyber-soap opera "Whatever," which Power writes and stars in under the stage name Skye Warner.

Power comes up with ideas for the "Whatever" content and then works through the script and story line with her stepfather, Mark Schilder, who also directs the show, and her co-creator, Dreyfuss.

Dreyfuss got involved last spring after hearing about the site from his brother, whose daughter, Natalie, acted in "Whatever."

Efforts to contact the actor for comments were unsuccessful, but he does have an official statement on the site: "My Internet fever was enlarged when I first saw goosehead.com, and I couldn't stop thinking about stuff it had and might have. I think Ashley is going to have a helluva lot of fun with this thing, as is everyone visiting it. I wanted to have some of that fun, so here I am."

Dreyfuss contacted the teenager, and now Ashley jams out ideas with him at the office, at her home and even at his house in New York.

"He and I create content together. He is so amazing," said Ashley. "I could listen to the man talk for hours."

The six episodes of "Whatever" deal with common teen issues -- parents, peer pressure, love and so on -- in a straightforward way and in somewhat graphic language. The 15-minute segments are largely based on Ashley's observations of teen life. For instance, while she was being grounded at home, she conceived the idea for the first episode, which deals with parental punishment from a teen's perspective.

The cyber-drama's unusual style attracted a first-look deal with MGM Entertainment.

"It means that any TV shows we create, MGM has the right to produce," stepfather Schilder said.

MGM Entertainment is currently negotiating with Showtime to broadcast a two-hour movie that might be turned into a weekly TV series.

"It's still in negotiation. No official announcement has been made," said Bryan Bird, the director of public relations for Showtime's Los Angeles office.

In addition, the Goosehead company has just made a deal with NBC to produce a live teen talk show, "Goosehead TV." Every Saturday morning, Power and five other teenagers will discuss teen issues and new music. Schilder describes the new series as a cross between MTV and "The View."

"In television, we are always looking for a way to make our shows interactive and to change our formats to keep the attention of an audience of multitaskers," said Linda Mancuso, president of Peter Engel Productions.

"Goosehead on television is the most organic example of this that I have seen by far."

Power's ability to connect with teens has also prompted the interest of Disney's Hyperion Books. Over the summer, she wrote "The Goosehead Guide to Life," where she shares her thoughts on subjects such as dating, friends and the creation of Web sites.

"We were looking for a voice that would speak to the teen audience," said Helen Perelman, senior editor of Hyperion. "Goosehead.com is not your typical Web site, and it's not your typical teen guidebook."

Goosehead has also ventured into the world of motor sports by sponsoring three-time National Hot Rod Association top-fuel champion Shirley Muldowney.

"All through her racing career, she was told she couldn't do this or she couldn't do that. But each time she proved her detractors wrong, which I can relate to, because I heard the same things in building goosehead.com," Power writes on her Web site.

Muldowney, Dreyfuss and "Whatever" might have brought the media to the Web site, but teens log in because of the message boards, chat rooms and music pages. The message boards and chat rooms are abuzz with a wide variety of Internet users, mostly teens, from as far away as Wollongong, Australia.

"I spend most of my time on the message boards, as well as the advice page," said Aaron Robinson, 15, from McLean, Va. "I find it interesting to see what other teens are going through."

For teens interested in music, there's an MP3 page and a link to live365.com, which allows users to have their own online radio station. The site also offers music videos and reviews of the hottest new bands. For example, goosehead.com introduced the Vacaville-based alternative group Papa Roach long before the release of its first major-label album, "Infest."

The site also has cartoons, poetry, homework help, art, news, games, e-mail, advice, horoscopes and other attractions that could keep teens logged in for hours.

"The topics that goosehead.com offers cover so many various interests, everybody is bound to find some place they can enjoy browsing," said Kari DePonte, 17, of Honolulu.

Power started goosehead.com in eighth grade after she transferred to a new school, where a popular group of girls made her life miserable. During this lonely, no-friends stage, she spent her free time surfing the Web.

Power discovered that most teen sites were either too young for her age group or designed from an adult perspective. She decided she could do a better job and set out to create a Web site for teens.

"I wanted to do something that we could relate to," Power said. "People who come to my Web site are people like me."

Four months after Power got started, she had her own site, named after a concrete goose lawn ornament that she decapitated while she was moving into the family's new home.

What began as a place to post pictures of herself, her friends and their pets has become a major business. Last February, a new and improved goosehead.com was launched.

"Goosehead.com was never designed to make money," said Schilder. "It was set up from an entertainment perspective." Though the site itself may not generate much money, it's a sure thing that the peripheral TV and book deals will.

Power may be the CEO of a company, but she is also a normal teen who likes to spend time with her friends.

"She's still a teenager, which I have a hard time remembering sometimes, like when she wants to go to the mall," said Schilder.

Power's friends tell her she works too much, as she rarely has time to hang out with them. Goosehead even seems to have affected her dating life.

"I never have a date, ever," she said. "It's getting to the point that I feel like I'm an alien."

While the family is excited about her success, Ashley's high profile has generated unwanted attention.

"I'm really excited, but in another sense, there are areas that are difficult," said Schilder.

"Weirdos are coming out of the woodwork. We're moving because of it."

At one point, Power had 30 people working for her, including her mom, Michelle Schilder, and her stepfather. She has recently downsized her staff, opting instead to use other teen Webmasters who work from home.

"She wanted to be able to say that this is a teen Web site, and I have a lot of other teens helping me," said Schilder.

Power is constantly working on developing new content for the page -- keeping a handle on what's cool and cutting edge. She and Dreyfuss are working on developing two new cyber-dramas. "The Janitor" will be about a mob hit man in the Witness Protection Program who gets relocated as a janitor at a high school. The other cyber-drama, "G.A.," will be about guardian angels.

In addition, Power is looking for other teen-produced cyber-dramas to put on the Web site.

"Her focus is getting shows from other teenagers," said Mark Schilder. "She believes that everyone should benefit from (her success) and I agree with her."

Both Goosehead's and Power's futures look bright. In a few years, Power will be moving on to college, but she plans on leaving goosehead.com as a teen site.

"I would like to turn it into a teen entertainment network," Power said. "I do want it to always remain a teen site."



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Web Sites Begin to Self Organize

By KATIE HAFNER


SUZANNE CROSS, a 49-year-old paralegal in New Orleans with a passion for history, is a prolific writer for a Web site called The VinesNetwork, which bills itself as "the Encyclopedia of Everything, Built by Everyone." Articles on the site, covering dozens of different topics, are all written by members.

Since Ms. Cross began writing for The Vines last August, she has produced nearly 40,000 words about ancient Rome. Her nom de plume is Heraklia Aelius and her lengthiest work to date, 18,000 words, is a series on the life of Julius Caesar.

Ms. Cross knows her writing is valued highly by other members of The Vines (www.thevines.com). In fact, she knows exactly how highly she is prized, because they give her grades. They rate each of her articles on a scale of 1 to 10. Ms. Cross consistently scores above 9.5, which puts her articles at the top of their category. As a result, she is featured more prominently on the site than lower-scoring writers.

The Vines and similar sites for writers operate not as conventional publications might, with dozens of editors deciding what to publish. Everything that is submitted is published, and then the members' tastes determine what articles you can actually find without burrowing into the site in search of that 0.5 article on someone's theory about other universes.

"It's really hard to find the really bad stuff on The Vines, said Eden Muir, a founder of the site. "It's designed to make the bad stuff disappear. It will be up for a little while, then it will sink like a stone."

On the other hand, articles with the highest ratings bubble to the top, and aspiring writers like Ms. Cross, whose articles have also attracted notice from the outside world, are enjoying a level of recognition that might not have been possible without the Web.

The Vines is an example of an emerging class of what are called self-organizing Web sites. Such sites are demonstrating that with a dab or two of well-written code and a bit of careful planning, a site can take a random collection of links or posts and turn them into a sophisticated, adaptive system.

Articles submitted to The Vines are read and rated by members. Software handles the rest, putting the highest-rated articles at the top of their respective categories. Royalties are based on the popularity of the article. The Vines also holds periodic contests and awards cash prizes to the writers with the highest standing, using the automated ranking system.

"The Web in 1996 didn't need to organize itself," said Joey Anuff, who is editor in chief of a new self-organizing site called Plastic.com. "But we have a Web now that's measured in billions of pages and millions of users, so any kind of mechanism that automatically imposes order becomes more useful and important."

Most efforts at self-organization so far have been fairly simple, but effective. Several features on Amazon.com, like the list of authors with books similar to the one being viewed, take what could be a random database and develop relationships within it. The search site Google, which ranks a site depending on how many other sites have linked to it, is yet another example of self- organization at work.

Sites for writers, like The Vines and others, are growing quickly, largely because of people's pent-up urge to pepper the world with their prose.

The writers certainly aren't driven by money. Contributors to The Vines and other self-publishing sites are paid a nominal fee. Ms. Cross has been paid $50 so far for roughly 40,000 words. "Maybe someday it will amount to something," she said, "but I'm not planning retirement. I'm not even planning a dinner."

More gratifying than the small payments is recognition from the outside world. On the strength of her articles on The Vines, Ms. Cross was recently asked to contribute a chapter to a book on ancient Rome, to be published in the spring by ibooks, a new imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Carol Skolnick, a 43-year-old copy writer in Manhattan who focuses on spiritual topics, writes for ThemeStream (www .themestream.com), another writers' site. Ms. Skolnick has been asked to contribute four of her ThemeStream essays to the "Chocolate for Women" series of inspirational books, published by Simon & Schuster.

Another ThemeStream author, A. M. Benneter of Seattle, who writes film reviews, noticed recently that her review of the Sylvester Stallone film "Get Carter" had been quoted in national advertising campaigns.

Yet another ThemeStream writer, Laura Shanley, of Boulder, Colo., who specializes in health and nutrition-related topics, recently attracted the attention of television producers at work on a medical series. The producers sent a film crew to interview Ms. Shanley. They were especially interested in two of her articles, "Cleanup on Aisle Nine: Woman Gives Birth in Grocery Store" and "Milkmen: Fathers Who Breastfeed."

There is also plenty of potential for abuse on the writers' sites. Recruit a group of friends to award your writing four stars every 20 minutes or so for a few days, and your work is bound to drift to the top of the heap.

But Themestream and other sites have developed methods for identifying so-called click circles, which consist of people who work to inflate one another's ratings. "We look for people who exhibit certain characteristics," said Bill Turpin, a founder of ThemeStream. "We measure the time between when you load the page and when you rate it, and if you rate everything good, with no variability in your ratings."

The reverse can happen, too. Richard Bossi, a 42-year-old freelance writer and former chef in Folsom, Calif., contributes food-related articles to The Vines under the name ChefCayenne. His ratings are consistently high, but once in a while he will see one of his articles come under attack by what some Web writers call retalirators. "People will sink me to the bottom," Mr. Bossi said. "There's a lot of jealousy."

Another form of adaptive Web site assigns ratings not to submissions themselves but to members' comments about the submissions. Slashdot, a three-year-old site for computer buffs that uses such a system, is the model for the new site Plastic.com. Slashdot operates with a minimum of human intervention yet gives visitors the opposite impression.

Articles sent to Slashdot (slashdot.org) are culled from the Web. After passing an initial test of suitability, administered by a Slashdot editor, a contribution is posted, followed by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of comments from the site's 305,000 users.

Once you have established yourself as a seasoned Slashdot user, the system will periodically assign you "moderator" status, a temporary position that carries with it the right to rate other members' comments on a scale of 0 to 5. Users can then browse through Slashdot using a quality filter. With the filter set to 3, for example, a visitor will see only those comments with a rating of 3 or higher.

Slashdot members who receive high ratings also earn special privileges: their posts start out at a higher rating than usual, and they are more likely to be chosen as a moderator in the future.

"This last privilege is a brilliant example of metafeedback at work," said Steven Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, 2001) and a vice president of Automatic Media, Plastic.com's parent company.

"It's the ratings snake devouring its own tail," Mr. Johnson said. "Moderators rate posts, and those ratings are used to select future moderators." The most impressive aspect of the Slashdot system, Mr. Johnson said, is that it not only encourages high quality in submissions to the site, but it also sets up an environment where community leaders can naturally rise to the top.

"It's interesting and powerful and it really works," Mr. Johnson said, adding that only the Internet could give rise to such a system. "It allows large groups of minds to get together and interact in a way they could never do before, in any other medium."

Another self-organizing aspect of Slashdot is the fact that because nearly all of the site's content comes from its readers, its emphasis changes according to contributors' interests. "The subject matter we cover has changed over the last couple of years because what our readers are interested in has changed," said Jeff Bates, a Slashdot founder.

Now, for instance, Mr. Bates said, the site carries far more articles about civil liberties than it did two years ago. "It's not a decision we made by sitting down in a smoky room and saying, `All right, we're going to be all about civil liberties now,' " Mr. Bates said. "But we all agreed, in some kind of Jungian collective unconscious way, that that topic was a big deal."

Plastic.com, which made its official debut earlier this week, is very similar to Slashdot, but with a more general audience in mind. While Slashdot advertises itself as "News for Nerds," Plastic.com will cover politics, movies, technology, games, music and other topics.

"We're trying to develop a system that can take the whole concept of news and figure out a way where the people who use the system can themselves decide what's interesting or not," said Mr. Anuff, who is also co-founder of Suck.com, a popular online magazine. "The end result will be a community-defined front page."

A still purer example of a self-organizing site is Everything2.com, created a year ago by Nathan Oostendorp, 22, a Slashdot founder. Unlike Slashdot and Plastic.com, which draw heavily on news stories found on the Web, Everything2 (everything2.com) more closely resembles writers' sites like The Vines, because it links only to other links within the site.

Yet Everything2 works far more autonomously than sites like The Vines. The Everything2 software monitors traffic patterns and modifies itself accordingly, assigning higher status to the more popular links. Users can also collect "experience points" and vote on one another's posts.

"It's this soup where people can drop in any little bit of information they want, like their favorite movies or directors or any other ideas," Mr. Anuff said, "and the only things they can link it to is other people's ideas in the same soup."

At first glance, Everything2 appears to be a chaotic jumble of random discourse. Look a little more closely, however, and you will see an intricately interconnected conversation, touching on topics as diverse as the languages of India, MTV and melanoma treatments.

"It's not really about anything in particular," said Mr. Oostendorp, whose site has about 2,000 users a day. "The only thing that's there is the system. Here's an open database with these rules functioning, and if you come in and spend time on it, you can gain prestige and reputation within the system, and that's an attractor to a lot of people."

Web sites with mechanisms for self-filtering, self-ranking and self-organization are very likely to continue to grow in number. "This is a fundamental shift in the Web's evolution," said Mr. Johnson, at Automatic Media. "The first generation of the Web was individual interactivity. And now, after a period of distraction, it's getting back to the roots of the idea of interactivity." But this time, he added, the interactivity is collective.



Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Marketers Turn to a Simple Tool: E-Mail

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The New York Times
December 13, 2000


SETH GODIN remembers when the dot-com people laughed at him. Mr. Godin had formed Yoyodyne, one of the early companies trying to promote Internet start-ups through the online equivalent of direct mail, which is usually referred to as junk mail.
A lack of glamour and a stench of spam -- the dreaded mass-e-mailed sucker bait of get-rich-quick schemes and online nostrums -- have long accorded e-mail déclassé status among the technoids. Mr. Godin recalled that when he pitched professionally written and targeted e-mail as a low-cost, efficient and effective way to reach the online audience, the response was less than enthusiastic. E-mail is boring, he was told.


But guess what: now it's Mr. Godin who is laughing, along with other champions of lowly e-mail, who have watched as Internet advertising companies have flamed out after spending millions of dollars on Super Bowl commercials and spectacular multimedia online advertisements.


That is because in these times of dot-com belt-tightening, e-mail looks like a bargain. Sending out a catalog mailing can cost $1 a customer, while a personalized e-mail is 5 cents, according to a report issued earlier this year by Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass.

What's more, while the rate at which consumers "click through" to read banner advertisements has plummeted in the last year to less than 1 percent, the response to e-mail messages was measured in the January Forrester survey at about 10 percent, with a quarter of those actually buying something. (Because this was a one-time survey, Forrester could not determine whether the response rates are rising or declining -- but more on that later.) Direct e-mail marketers see these as positive numbers.

So, apparently, do advertisers. A Forrester survey of 50 e-mail marketing managers found that they planned to triple their e-mail spending by 2004, the year that the analysts predicted that American marketers would send almost 210 billion e-mail messages.

For consumers, such a blitz could be hellish or heavenly. To those who feel inundated by unbidden electrons and try to guard their privacy against the commercial world, no amount of online coupons will seem anything but menacing.

But for those who enjoy receiving bargain tips, who zip through their morning e-mail messages without complaint, the new age of personalized, targeted messages promises to bring information and deals they want, when they want them and where it is most convenient -- be it a home PC, hand-held organizer or squint-inducing cell-phone screen.

Most of these messages will not be spam, according to Forrester, though the onslaught of unwanted e-mails may never go away. Four years from now, Forrester predicts, most e-mail will go to consumers who agree explicitly to receive it. Most of it will be intended to hold on to current customers -- the most economical use of the medium.

The rise in the fortunes of e-mail -- now being used by retailers and e-tailers like Amazon.com, Eddiebauer.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Borders.com and Victoriasecret.com -- comes after several developments in the e-commerce universe, not least of which is the realization that money really does matter. At first, as new enterprises crowded the Internet, one significant question was hardly ever asked, and even less frequently answered: namely, who would pay for it?

Some predicted that Web companies would follow the example of newspaper publishers, who sell their product for little or nothing and make their profits from advertising sales.


B UT Internet companies have also learned an old rule of advertising, which is that even the best commercials cannot make a business successful if the business does not make sense in the first place. An online advertisement can do only so much, however refined, powerful or entertaining it may be. On the other hand, e-mail, even if it's homely, gets the job done, especially when coupled with time-tested principles of the direct-marketing industry, which boil down to "test, test, test, measure, measure, measure," said H. Robert Wientzen, the chief executive of the Direct Marketing Association.

Those who are among the best at formulating and directing e-mail are the people who are good at sending regular direct mail, old-economy types like Mr. Wientzen, who gleefully say they have beaten many new-economy people at their own game.

A recent survey for the Direct Marketing Association found that nearly all the group's members were on the Internet; 69 percent reported that their online operations were profitable, with 20 percent reporting profits of more than $1 million a year. These figures are especially hearty at a time when some of the best-financed dot-coms are circling the drain. The profitability figure, though unverified, is up from 49 percent a year ago.

"The guys who know how to do it are the ones who are going to come out ahead," Mr. Wientzen said. "I don't think that's brain surgery." The difference is the attention to detail that may make the direct marketer a bore at parties but a winner at the bank.

E-mail works precisely because its success can be calculated so extensively, William Park, the chief executive of Digital Impact, said in an e-mail interview. "It's the most measurable marketing vehicle of all time," said Mr. Park, whose company, in San Mateo, Calif., helps the Hewlett-Packard Company and other businesses reach customers through personalized e-mail and other media. "You know exactly who you are sending e-mails to, you know how they are responding -- did they click, did they buy?"

The speed of e-mail revolutionizes direct marketing, Mr. Park said. "People respond to their e-mails in a matter of days or they won't respond at all," he said. "So marketers can determine if their campaign was a success in 48 hours versus the four to six weeks it might take for a direct-mail campaign."

The combination of lower cost and greater effectiveness has made believers out of many online merchants, including Jon Nordmark, a co-founder of E-bags, which sells luggage and accessories. In the last year, he said, judicious use of e-mail has helped him lower advertising costs by two-thirds, while sales have more than doubled. Last December, the company sold 18,000 bags online; this December he said he expected to sell 43,000.

Mr. Nordmark said that his company had tried to economize from the start, while other companies spent their venture capital and stock money wildly. "Too much money makes you stupid," he said. While the flashier dot-coms are still trying to figure out how to get people to pay for something they already receive free, like online news, direct marketers are building on decades of experience in sending consumers mail they don't think they want.

They are then making sales from a small but profitable fraction of the recipients. And they don't sulk that their contribution to the new economy is going unrecognized. Profits are a powerful consolation.

Along with the testing, measuring and datamongering that Mr. Park speaks of, classic direct marketing means providing the kind of customer service that puts workers on the telephone to answer questions and puts armies in the warehouses to ship products and manage the inevitable returned goods.

Mr. Wientzen recalled a recent visit to the luxurious offices of a lowerManhattan online retailer that was trying to to pull itself toward profitability. With wonder in his voice, he recalled that the first thing the company wanted to show him was its sophisticated Web site.

"They kept using the term 'storefront,' " Mr. Wientzen recalled. "I kept thinking of it as a movie set without much behind it."

Hans Peter Brondmo, the author of "The Engaged Customer: The New Rules of Internet Direct Marketing," said that gradual understanding -- that there is more to e-commerce than designing a cool Web site -- was leading to a broad change in how online companies do business.


"Marketers are having to shift their thinking into being service providers," he said, as opposed to what he calls simply telling and selling.

One company that Mr. Brondmo works with, Palm Computing, uses e-mail messages to alert customers about new software for their hand-held devices, tying the messages directly to the kind of device the customers own, as well as to their line of work. The customers reply by e-mail with questions and complaints.

The key to making e-mail effective, enthusiasts say, is getting personal, which strengthens bonds with current customers.

"If a person buys red wine, send offers related to red wine rather than discounts on white wine," Mr. Park said. "Your customer has given you permission to e-mail them; you have an obligation and an urgency to send them relevant e-mails, because if you don't, your customers will begin to ignore your messages much like they ignore banner ads."

West Shell III, the chief executive of Netcentives, a San Francisco company that helps other companies operate their e-mail marketing programs, agreed. "Relevancy drives response," he said. "If you're not relevant, you're gone." Companies like Petopia, which sells pet products, build on their knowledge of the customer with each successive e-mail by asking questions -- What is your dog's breed? What is his name? -- that are worked into future messages.

This lesson is taken to heart at LifeMinders, a company in Herndon, Va., that sends regular, personalized e-mail that includes advertising and offers of bargains to 20 million consumers. Its customers supply personal information in exchange for more accurately targeted offers, which range from discounted subscriptions to Sports Illustrated to pitches for dog food.


"If I put something as simple as the name of your dog in the subject line of your e-mail, the e-mail is opened about six times more frequently than if it were not there," said Stephen R. Chapin Jr., the chief executive of LifeMinders.

LifeMinders now helps other companies manage their e-mail marketing. Mr. Chapin came to the Internet from direct marketing, where he sold credit cards by mail. "The same thing we did in direct marketing we do in online advertising," he said.

A NOTHER lesson emerging from the e-commerce shakeout is that the Internet works better as one element of a company's marketing strategy than it does as the only way to reach consumers. Kenneth Weil, the vice president for new media at Victoria's Secret, which features supermodels wearing sexy underwear in its advertisements and in its e-mail, said his company sends e-mail to 3.3 million people, encouraging them not only to go to the Victoria's Secret Web site but also to call or visit such a store nearby.

"It's part of a greater strategy," he said, a strategy that totals $145 million in advertising and marketing expenses each year. About half the e-mail messages contain images and links to Web pages and the rest are simple text messages sent to customers whose computers can't receive more complex mail. Privacy advocates have warned that the picture-laden e-mails, because they use much of the technology from Web pages, open consumers to the same kinds of surreptitious monitoring that online sites engage in. But the use of the e-mail with pictures and Web links is sure to grow, since industry analysts estimate that those messages are about two and a half times as effective as e-mails that use plain text alone.


This being the ephemeral Web universe, there are those who detect chinks in the electronic armor of online direct mail. One is Donna Hoffman, a business professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who studies marketing on the Internet. "Things seem good now, but, in fact, the signs are already coming," she said, that the success of e-mail marketing has led to a glut, and that "the overuse has already reduced its effectiveness."

Professor Hoffman said she had seen other industry figures that indicate the 10 percent click-through rate in the Forrester study has slipped to 5 percent. "I think it's going to go the same path as banner ads," she said. "The more of this stuff you get, the more likely you are to start deleting it. It's like, 'Enough already.' "

Several companies said they were aware of the pitfalls of overzealousness. Todd Simon, a senior vice president of Omaha Steaks and the vice chairman of Omahasteaks.com, said he wanted his companies to be known as purveyors of fine meats, not purveyors of spam. "We have to be very, very sensitive to the spamming issue," Mr. Simon said. "There's a chance if you just give them too much stuff, or they're not interested, they're going to say bye-bye."

For his part, Mr. Godin of Yoyodyne said his new passion was viral marketing, in which companies try to adapt the notion of word of mouth to the Web.

Viral marketing has been praised as the next big thing; its promise, like so much in the online world, has not been borne out so far. But Mr. Godin says that is because people have not figured out how to do it right yet. He said viral marketing can take many forms, including Web pages and banner advertisements. Another one, unprepossessing as always, is e-mail.

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With Soft Economy, Financial Insecurity, Employees' Workplace Stress May Worsen

By CAROL HYMOWITZ and RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

As a real-estate and business attorney, John R. Browne III is familiar with stress. But in his 34 years on the job, nothing has compared to what he shoulders now as the economy heads downward.

With five children's college tuition to pay and a portfolio of tanking technology stocks, the 62-year-old attorney worries every day that his retirement nest egg will crack further. His clients, anxious about their own futures, are driving harder bargains now and taking longer to pay their fees. And even the things that were supposed to make his life easier -- like e-mail and his cellphone -- have tethered him to work and usurped his private life.

"I feel more stressed than I've ever been," says Mr. Browne, who sets an alarm clock every evening in an attempt to leave the office at a reasonable hour. And he figures the more the economy slows, the worse the strain will get. "I work hard, and to see your retirement going down the drain ... it's very disconcerting."

Multiply John Browne times millions of other lawyers, doctors, sales executives, factory workers, dot-commers and anxious stockholders, and you've got a picture of stress in early 2001. Whatever their station, all have come to expect more wealth in recent years. Now with the first economic slowdown in a decade, they are facing an unsettling uncertainty. Stock portfolios are shrinking and gluttons for punishment can even constantly monitor the shrinkage online.

Meanwhile, mergers, downsizings and the ability of managers to monitor individuals' job performance add more layers of insecurity. As workers fret about layoffs, they do so knowing that with new information technology, their managers can track performance division by division, employee by employee, with startling precision.

Today's stresses, of course, pale beside the conditions of decades past, when some workers feared for their lives in dangerous factories and bleak sweatshops. Stress was a "hardy perennial in the textile mills and meatpacking yards of the 19th century, and the factories and offices of the 20th century," says Nancy Koehn, a business historian at Harvard Business School. Letters by business tycoons, commodity clerks and assembly workers in the early 20th century are filled with complaints about how "no one has time to stop and give a stranger directions, or time for family or service to community," says Ms. Koehn. "There has always been the omnipresent authority of the clock at work."

Today's stress is, in many ways, about too much information coming from too many sources -- and the loss of control that instills. A survey by Pitney Bowes of some 1,200 workers from receptionists to chief executives at top companies found that employees handle an average of 204 messages a day, counting e-mail, voice mail, snail mail and memos. And all the cool tech tools now available -- from credit-card size cellphones to wireless Palm hand-held organizers -- have in turn made us reachable anytime, anywhere.

"You never feel done," says Paul Finkle, chief operating officer of HRPath.com, an online human-resource company based in Alameda, Calif. He used to listen to music in his car driving to and from work but now talks on his cellphone with clients while he drives. And although e-mail enables him to communicate more quickly than he once did with faxes and letters, the volume of messages he sends and receives has increased his workload by 30% in the last three years, he estimates.

Mr. Browne, the attorney who heads the business, real-estate and trust department of Laughlin Falbo Levy & Moresi in San Francisco, grumbles that because his legal clients now insist that he communicate with them by e-mail, "You have to check that every five minutes." Clients also expect to be able to reach him at any hour of the night or day. "It's a blow to my privacy. It doesn't just affect me at the office, it affects my life," he says.

To be sure, some workers thrive on stress. It's the lifeblood of such professions as medicine, law and the military, where the ability to perform precisely under pressure has long been a prerequisite. Today, the young software engineers and venture capitalists who launched the Internet revolution love to boast about their 24/7 schedules.

Is there a happy medium? Some stress experts use the analogy of a violin string. Not enough pressure on the string produces a weak, raspy tone. Too much pressure can produce a shrill noise, or even cause the string to snap. But "just the right degree can create magnificent tones," says the Web site for the American Institute of Stress in Yonkers, N.Y.

The problem is, in today's workplace, many employees, like the shrill violin string, are being pulled too tightly, and in too many directions. "There is a lot more stimulation at work, which is exciting but also exhausting," says Harvard Business School's Ms. Koehn. The constraint of being stuck at one job or one company for life has given way to the freedom of job-hopping and taking charge of one's career. But even that can inspire its own insecurities. With people "getting yanked around [because of layoffs or mergers] and having to reinvent themselves ... there is less opportunity to experience a shared narrative," says Ruth J. Luban, a Santa Monica, Calif. psychotherapist who counsels layoff victims.

Such anxieties were easier to tolerate in a booming economy, when employees could count on ever-fatter pay checks, options and richer retirement portfolios, as well as new jobs if they lost or didn't like their old ones. For those who entered the work force in the last five years and have never weathered a downturn, the economic whiplash may prove particularly disquieting -- and humbling.

Not surprisingly, employees report more severe workplace stress ailments during economic slowdowns than booms. In 1998, a boom year and the most recent for which Bureau of Labor Statistics data was available, there were 53% fewer reported stress-related cases than in 1993, a time when the job market was weaker and corporate layoffs rife. Even so, stress took a toll on productivity. The median job absence for stress-related conditions was 15 days in 1998, according to the BLS. But despite numerous claims, most courts have rejected the notion that workplace stress is a disability in and of itself. As a result, employers in most cases are not legally required to make their workplaces more accommodating to stressed-out workers.

Still some are starting to add once unheard-of perks such as gyms or meditation centers, for example, where they can unwind. Sales of squeezable stress balls at Stressballs.com have doubled every year for the past three years -- due mainly to corporate purchases. A handful of employers, including Goldman Sachs, give out scented candles as freebies at job fairs in a symbolic nod to the pressures of work.

Meanwhile, some Internet companies in Silicon Valley have offered employees a paid week or two off -- unthinkable just two years ago, when round-the-clock devotion was all but mandated. With so many workers' stock options under water, "these companies can't work employees like animals any more simply by promising them that they will be rich in a few years," says H.R. Path's Mr. Finkel. "They have to focus more on their culture."

For the most part, employees are on their own when it comes to coping with stress. Attorney Mr. Browne, who feels "zonked and spaced out" when he is stressed, meditates when he gets to work at 7 a.m. and does yoga at least three times a week "or my blood pressure goes up," he says. To relax, he also dons "big flashy bow ties" and does magic tricks. "You can't think about your law cases then," he says.

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Managers Suffering From Stress Should Speak Up to Find Relief

IT ISN'T HARD WORK that causes managers the greatest amount of stress. Most accept long hours and pressured deadlines as part of the job.

What triggers harrowing days and sleepless nights is a syndrome that can be called "impossible expectations." Managers suffering from it are asked by their bosses to solve problems, but then don't receive the tools or resources that will enable them to do that.

This scenario, already prevalent in corporate America, is occurring more frequently as the economy softens. It also helps explain why so many midlevel managers are acutely frustrated so much of the time, says Gerald Kraines, president of the Levinson Institute, Cambridge, Mass. "Over and over again, managers at all sorts of companies tell me they really care about being successful and helping their companies be successful, but that they are set up to fail," he says. They get problems to solve but not the people, budgets or consensus to forge solutions. Instead of feeling challenged, he says, they feel "burdened and abused," which causes a lot of stress.

THE MANAGER of a new customer-order system at a technology company has been putting in 12 and 14-hour days to get the system activated quickly, but he increasingly asks himself, "Why am I killing myself?" An engineer by training, he agreed to take on the job a year ago because superiors told him a streamlined and computerized order system would improve productivity and customer service and produce substantial savings.

But he failed to realize what enormous obstacles he would face. While the system was approved by top managers, "they never communicated their expectations or commitment to the troops," he says. Because the system affects almost every department and business process -- from accounting to manufacturing and marketing -- hundreds of employees had to adjust to it. Yet not even the company's salespeople, the system's primary users, were told they had to use it.

That task has fallen to the manager, who spends hours each day trying to quell employees' anger and justify the need for the system. "Since when was I supposed to be the defender of this?" he asks, noting that he is inundated with e-mail from colleagues who insist the system is inefficient or unnecessary.

Overcoming fears he would be judged inept, the manager finally told a vice president about his difficulties last week. "Thankfully," he says, "the vice president has agreed to get involved" and help motivate employees with training programs.

Another stress-producing scenario for managers is being assigned a job that clashes with their talents. Call it the "mistaken identity syndrome." It typically hits managers in midcareer, after they have climbed a few corporate rungs and proved their expertise in a particular area. Then they are promoted to a job that their bosses assure them is important but that they quickly come to dislike.

SUCH WAS THE CASE for a manager at a health company who earned her stripes as a brilliant marketer. She relished her role as a mentor and maintained a hands-on approach even when she was overseeing a staff of 500. But when she was promoted further and found herself in the corner office, she had to delegate the work she most loved doing to thousands of subordinates.

Convinced she had to prove herself in her new job, she stifled her discontent for months -- until she started to suffer migraine headaches and dread coming to work. At home, she was often short-tempered with her family. At work she either became overly involved in projects that much lower-level employees were supposed to handle or resentful of managers now in charge of staffs and jobs she had once held. She continually second-guessed her subordinates to stay involved in the work she enjoyed, but then lost a number of key staff members who felt stymied by her and quit.

The manager finally made a break herself -- leaving the company and eventually landing a new job at a smaller concern where she is in charge of sales and marketing and a staff of about 300. "Some people may say I couldn't handle the prestige and power of what I walked away from, but I'm back in a job I love," she says.

Many managers who find themselves in unfulfilling jobs feel stuck, because they believe either that they have no place to go or that they will be poorly regarded if they reveal their discontent. They often delay making a change but then perform poorly in jobs they dislike, undermining their chances for new positions.

Stressed managers who don't speak up won't get any relief. And sometimes even seemingly small moves can make a big difference -- from delegating tasks the manager is ill suited for to refusing an extra assignment that will take too much time away from enjoyable tasks. What is important, career counselors say, is taking time to identify what work yields the most pleasure.

A corporate attorney who realized after five years that she disliked being a lawyer used a four-week vacation to figure out her situation. She realized she liked working with people far more than writing briefs -- and subsequently became a manager in her company's training department.

Wall Street Journal

Long Hours, Cramped Quarters Produce Short Fuses at Work
By DANIEL COSTELLO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


For months, Costas Tsolkas kept his frustration over long hours, cramped quarters and rushed deadlines at a New York Internet company under wraps. But last summer, when his boss, Ron Yudovich, needled him one time too many, he erupted, lashing out with an obscenity-laced tirade.

"Sometimes you just snap," says Mr. Tsolkas, who quit his job a week later. Mr. Yudovich, for his part, simply calls Mr. Tsolkas a "bad employee."

First there was road rage, then air rage. Now, there's desk rage. A New Economy cocktail of longer hours, increased workloads and stock-market tremors is fueling a growing number of explosions at the office. Buckling under the pressure, employees are increasingly losing their tempers with bosses and colleagues.

Occupational experts and authorities on workplace stress note that companies generally do not report instances of worker confrontations; but a survey on workplace stress released last summer by The Marlin Co. of North Haven, Conn., showed that 42% of office workers said they had jobs in an office where yelling and verbal abuse happened frequently.

Victor Scarano, director of occupational and forensic psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Waco, Texas, pins much of the blame on the stress induced by overwork. "You can't run an engine at full throttle for 10 years and not expect it to crack," Dr. Scarano says.

The physical aspects of the workplace also come into play. Integra Realty Resources Inc., a real-estate appraisal company, believes that high commercial real-estate prices have led to the "Dilbertization" of America, whereby workers, as in the "Dilbert" comic strip, spend their lives trapped in a maze of tiny cubicles.

Sean Hutchinson, president of New York-based Integra, says the average number of employees per square foot in many office spaces is at an all-time high. He calls it the "scrunch factor" and says it exacerbates the traditional real-estate caste system separating management and lower-level employees. "The big guys take offices that are just as big or bigger than in the past, while the minions are getting stuffed into smaller and smaller spaces," Mr. Hutchinson says.

The economic boom of the last few years hasn't helped matters either. For one thing, it has led to a big jump in the cost of homes in most cities, sending people farther into the boondocks to live and making commutes longer. By the time worker bees arrive at the office, they are already irate.

Then there is the youth factor of the Internet age. There are more younger employees in high-profile positions -- smart, but unused to organizational pressures. Philip Antonelli, 26 years old, took a high-profile sales job at a technology company in Boston last year, clocking 14 hours a day and overseeing a number of big accounts. The result: He has become so stressed he feels he's "always in the bottom of the ninth inning with two strikes out. ... I've gone through four phones since I got here because I keep throwing them against the wall."

Workplace violence culminating in bloodshed -- for example, the recent shootings in a Massachusetts office that killed seven people -- gets the most publicity, but far more common are the shouting matches and fistfights that don't make the evening news. Robert Wichowski, an engineer at an aerospace company near Hartford, Conn., recently watched, horrified, as two engineers in his office had to be physically separated after a disagreement over the proper procedure for filing paperwork on a faulty computer chip. And in a separate incident, a co-worker raised his fist at him over a disagreement about a basketball game. "Some of these guys are really high-strung," he says.

The Marlin Co. says that men between the ages of 25 and 45 are most prone to act out in the workplace, but the company notes that more women complain of on-the-job stress. "Women are definitely having desk rage," says Frank Kenna, Marlin's president. "They just do it more subtly."

The Marlin study says larger companies have more stressed-out employees: Nearly one-third of employees at companies with more than 1,000 people say they are "at least somewhat" stressed, compared with 16% of employees in companies of fewer than 100 people.

Most companies ignore the problem, says Don Grimme, one of the many "workplace stress" consultants popping up in the last few years. General Motors Corp. has an employee-wellness program that includes meditation and tai chi in its workout facilities and a 24-hour help line for harried workers. And Ernst & Young LLP's new tax center in Indianapolis has putting greens, fish tanks and a recreation room where workers can nap.


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Warning Signs

How can you tell if a colleague has reached the breaking point? Experts note some possible indicators:

Skipping group lunches: A signal someone feels demoralized and not part of their work community

Coming to work late: One of the first hints that stress is eating away at motivation

Calling in sick frequently: If people feel they aren't getting a break at work, they may start taking them on their own

Withdrawing: When someone uncharacteristically retreats from watercooler talk and office banter, it may indicate an unhealthy distancing from colleagues

Obsessing: If colleagues focus on seemingly insignificant matters or isolated incidents, it may mean they are angry or can no longer cope with the big picture

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As Pace of Mergers, Acquisitions Quickens, Takeover Stress Takes Its Toll on Workers

By JOANN S. LUBLIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

TORONTO -- David R. Brown spreads his long, thin hands on a restaurant table covered with butcher-block paper. Nearly every cuticle looks ripped and red.

"See my fingers? That's self-inflicted,'' says the 48-year-old president and chief executive of StackTeck Systems Inc., a small producer of plastic injection molds used to make lids, containers and plates. "That's how the stress manifests itself. My wife says I do it in my sleep.''

Mr. Brown has endured several bouts of takeover stress since the fall of 1996, when his Toronto employer, Tradesco Mold Ltd., was bought by Castle Harlan Inc., a New York private-equity firm. StackTeck was formed later as a holding company to operate Tradesco and other units. Mr. Brown, formerly Tradesco's vice president of technical services, assumed its presidency in March 1997. After a stressful "honeymoon from hell" in the top job, he then found himself on the other side of the fence, seeking takeover targets and trying to alleviate workers' anxiety.

The quickening pace of mergers is making experiences like Mr. Brown's increasingly common. The total value of announced mergers and acquisitions world-wide grew 5.1% to a record $3.48 trillion last year, with the number of deals totaling nearly 37,000, according to Thomson Financial Securities Data. Yet 75% of those deals, by several experts' estimates, will fail to achieve expected results. One reason: Most buyers overlook the tremendous uncertainty and insecurity among employees triggered by a takeover. "They underestimate how much human pain is required to get to the financial gain, if they get the gain at all," says Mitchell Marks, an M&A consultant and organizational psychologist in San Francisco.

Takeover survivors fear not only job loss but also the frustrations of working for strangers. Workplace consultants say employees frequently become depressed, sleep less, gain weight, resume smoking or increase their alcohol consumption. The stress level "is more intense the higher you go" in management, Dr. Marks reports.

So productivity often suffers and seasoned managers often quit. Merger-related stress is why people leave a merged organization "well over 50% of the time," says Robert Morgan, president of Spherion Corp.'s human-capital consulting group in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. The staffing and professional-services concern itself was formed when two companies -- Interim Services Inc. and Norrell Corp. -- merged in 1999.

At times, employees' stress level is directly tied to how well a company prepares its staff for a takeover. For example, there were extensive layoffs at Norrell's headquarters in Atlanta, which had employed about 700 people, but absenteeism and voluntary turnover actually dropped substantially following the March 1999 announcement. "People told us they felt less stressed because we overcommunicated" details about the deal's impact on employees and customers, Mr. Morgan says. "We communicated something every day for the first eight to 10 weeks."

But in most deals, takeover stress often persists long after a deal's completion -- especially for individuals such as Mr. Brown who gain a far bigger job and workload. The lanky executive with a self-deprecating wit joined Tradesco as a $7-an-hour mold designer in 1978. With a willingness to work hard and a knack for getting along well with clients, Mr. Brown moved up the chain until he became vice president of technical services in 1990.

When he first learned about Castle Harlan's proposed $25 million acquisition of his company, he was fairly sanguine. It wasn't until after the deal was completed that his stress intensified. As Castle Harlan's top executives delayed in replacing Tradesco's exiting president, Mr. Brown started losing sleep, skipping lunch -- and toiling longer hours to impress his new bosses. Explains Leonard Harlan, Castle Harlan's president and then a Tradesco director: "We were looking to be convinced that we wanted to bet on him and that takes time."

Mr. Brown faced stress on several fronts. He worried that a new Tradesco boss "would force me to change the way I dealt with my customers. I could lose my customers," thereby jeopardizing his and four subordinates' jobs. But equally worrisome was the possibility that he, a high-school dropout, might have to take command of the 107-worker business. "I was totally lacking confidence" to lead, he recalls. He frequently woke in the middle of the night and occasionally stared at the ceiling for hours, wondering, "What do I do if I get picked?"

After he was chosen, the sleeplessness and edginess worsened during his initial year at the helm. "I thought I had to have all the answers," Mr. Brown recalls. "That was the biggest source of stress in my life." For his first monthly board meeting, he spent two weeks preparing each department's report, working his usual 11-hour days and letting other duties fall by the wayside. Meanwhile, Tradesco's new owners set stricter performance standards for the once laid-back enterprise.

Castle Harlan officials noted the toll the new responsibilities were taking on him. He "was quite a bit hyper then. He was fidgety in [board] meetings" and sometimes criticized colleagues too quickly, Mr. Harlan says. Mr. Harlan privately urged the weary leader to take a vacation, which he had hadn't done since early 1995; still, he put the vacation off for another six months.

In December 1997, Mr. Brown exhibited dangerously high blood pressure. Later that month, Tradesco sales and marketing vice president Fernando Segovia marched into Mr. Brown's office, slammed the door, and turned to his boss. "He stuck his finger in my face and said, 'Brown, you stay the f--- out of my department!'" Mr. Brown recollects. (Mr. Segovia confirms the incident.) "I thought I was helping him," Mr. Brown says. "What I was doing was second-guessing."

Worried her husband might suffer a heart attack, Mr. Brown's wife, Kathy, fruitlessly urged him to give up the presidency. "He was always the calm one" in the family until then, Ms. Brown says. To ease his stress, he began to run every morning, pop more vitamins, eat better and delegate more at the office. His blood pressure fell.

The stress hasn't ended though. Mr. Brown came under new pressure to produce faster revenue growth, so he began looking for his own takeover targets. His insomnia returned as he learned the hard way that a takeover isn't easy on either side.

Indeed, one of his targets, Fairway Molds Inc., tersely resisted his takeover proposal during a tense session at the mold maker's Walnut, Calif., headquarters in February 1998. The pervasive sentiment was, "We want to kill you," says Tom Smith, Fairway's current head.

Remembering his own angst over Tradesco's acquisition, Mr. Brown agonized the whole flight home. "How am I going to do this deal without upsetting their culture?" he fretted. The solution: create a holding company with Tradesco and Fairway as separate subsidiaries. He completed his 10-month courtship of Fairway and formed StackTeck in October 1998.

Nowadays, Mr. Brown must assuage workers' apprehension at Unique Mould Makers Ltd., a Toronto manufacturer that StackTeck bought in June 1999, about being moved in August to a larger plant 40 miles away. More than 25% of its 70 highly skilled workers may quit rather than drive farther, predicts Mark Todd, a Unique vice president.

Though he believes such a forecast is overly pessimistic, Mr. Brown concedes "we will lose people." Trying to gauge workers' mood, he spends an evening chatting up the rank-and-file around Unique's noisy shop floor. "What do you think about the new building?" he asks Sylvester Szlendak, an equipment operator.

"It's too far for us," Mr. Szlendak replies, his arms crossed. "Nobody's going to like it."

Still pursuing takeover targets, Mr. Brown flew to the U.S. a dozen times in the past year to woo one Midwestern mold maker. The deal stalled in late summer. Mr. Brown anxiously tore his cuticles and fidgeted in his seat before disclosing the setback during StackTeck's September board meeting, according to Mr. Todd, an attendee. Mr. Brown concurs he felt agitated. "I took that [collapse] as a personal failure."

But the deal "is still cooking," the determined executive declares. He continues to lose sleep worrying about the potential acquisition, he says. But now, if he can't fall asleep again, he goes jogging -- because 3 a.m. is too early to head for work.

"You learn to get [stress] under control," Mr. Brown says. "Or you grow new fingers."

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Never Underestimate The Power Of eMail



12 January 2001

By Jonathan Jackson


You can stick a fork in AT&T because they're just about done. For those who haven't been following their litany of woes, it's sad to see this American icon - once the favorite stock of "widows and orphans" - devolve into little better than a dot bombed company. Just before the holiday season, AT&T released still more bad news and blamed their problems, at least in part, on e-mail. In particular, AT&T's CFO singled out "more migration of [long distance] minutes to other technologies like wireless and e-mail."

Let's consider the implications. In the not-too-distant past, AT&T essentially owned the voice communications market. With deregulation and the attendant competition, their market share shrank. But by and large people were still reaching out to touch other people using a telephone. Then, along came the internet, and the ways people could communicate with each other exploded.

At the time, everyone thought e-mail was going to take the place of first class mail and the only loser would be the post office. As eMarketer noted in the eMail Marketing Report, e-mail is already used much more frequently than traditional mail:

As things turned out, e-mail has proved to be a threat to more than just surface mail. How many fewer express packages, for example, are sent as a result of e-mail? How long will it be before e-greetings gain market dominance thereby affecting both regular mail and greeting card companies?

On the bright side (at least for the advertising business), this has also opened up a panoply of opportunities for marketers. Needless to say, it wasn't really possible to advertise on a long-distance call or birthday card. But now, in exchange for free e-mail service, consumers seem more than willing to accept a little commercialism with their messages. In other words, for every e-mail that is sent instead of making a long distance call or sending a card, another marketing impression is available.

The sky's the limit if present trends continue. E-mail is by far the most popular internet application already, used by 96% of all active internet users. By year-end 2003, there will be 140.3 million e-mail users, representing 61.5% of the total US population of adults and teens (aged 14+):

In other words, there's going to be a tidal wave of e-mail in the coming years - much of it being sent at the expense of the telephone and first-class mail. It's up to marketers to position themselves now to surf that wave effectively.



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