Automatic Media
Encyclopedia
Foundation
Automatic Media was created as a joint venture by early editorial dot-comsDot-com company
A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com , is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain, ".com" .While the term can refer to present-day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with...
suck.com
Suck.com
Suck.com was one of the earliest ad-supported content sites on the Internet. It featured daily editorial content on a wide variety of topics, including politics and pop-culture and was targeted at Generation X...
and Feed Magazine
Feed Magazine
Feed or feedmag.com was one of the earliest e-zines that relied entirely on its original online content. Feed was founded by Stefanie Syman and Steven Johnson in 1995, and soon found a devoted online following. The zine had daily content, and focused on media, pop culture, technology, science and...
.
It was announced on July 9, 2000 that the founders of Suck.com
Suck.com
Suck.com was one of the earliest ad-supported content sites on the Internet. It featured daily editorial content on a wide variety of topics, including politics and pop-culture and was targeted at Generation X...
and Feed.com had raised $4 million in fresh venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
financing from Lycos
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...
Ventures LP for their new project. Automatic Media's first acquisition was Alt.Culture, an online encyclopedia of alternative culture focused primarily on internet fads. The formation of Automatic Media allowed all of the individual sites to utilize common advertising sales forces, technologies and administrative resources. The sites themselves maintained distinctive brand names and editorial voices, but heavily cross-linked and advertised for the partner sites. In January of 2001, Automatic Media announced its first original venture, Plastic.com
Plastic.com
Plastic.com was an internet forum for news and discussion of events and issues. The site was community-driven, with readers moderating discussions, submitting stories, and participating in their selection.Its motto was 'Recycling the Web in Real Time'....
. Plastic's philosophy was to have extremely low operational costs by running entirely on user-contributed stories. Its original staff was only four people.
Demise
Less than a year after its foundation, Automatic Media's subsidiaries shocked readers with the announcement that they were declaring bankruptcyBankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
, citing "an inability to secure additional financing". Feed and Suck both announced that they were firing their staffs, and would no longer produce content. It was also announced that Plastic would continue with a skeleton staff working pro bono
Pro bono
Pro bono publico is a Latin phrase generally used to describe professional work undertaken voluntarily and without payment or at a reduced fee as a public service. It is common in the legal profession and is increasingly seen in marketing, technology, and strategy consulting firms...
, although its fate was uncertain until bought by one of suck's original founders Carl Steadman
Carl Steadman
Carl Steadman is co-founder of suck.com, creator of several pieces of early web-savvy literature and current operator of plastic.com. He was also production director for HotWired....
.
Impact
Automatic Media's echoed the failure of many other web content sites. The failure of these sites disproved the common notion that the World Wide WebWorld Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
make it easy for independent media sites to publish and distribute content for cheap compared with the costs of putting out print magazines. Combined with the questions raised by other dot-com
Dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
collapses, investors were now questioning whether advertising alone could sustain the enormous and often underestimated costs of producing and hosting original material.
External links
- "Pioneering Websites Join Forces" - a zdnet article on the formation of Automatic Media
- A MetaFilter Thread on the rumors of Automatic's closure
- A News.com article on Automatic Media's collapse
- A Salon.com article on the end of Suck and Feed (Editorial by Scott RosenbergScott Rosenberg (journalist)- External links :**...
; audio version) - A USA Today article on the history of Automatic Media