12 January 2000

So, I guess what I'm saying is, Harry Knowles will be a millionaire in the next five years. And he won't even have to allow an audit of how many hits his site really gets. He is the most valuable name on the Internet for entertainment. He has broken through. He won't likely be purchased by AOLTW, but maybe Starwave, trying to consolidate its holdings or a new IPOing webcaster that is trying to break into the market in a big way. Same with Drudge. As a brand, he is valuable. He may be hated by the news community, but that won't matter. His name is valuable. His brand is valuable.

But in both of these cases, part of what will make the purchases of the sites work will be a sense that they are still free to do as they want. And they will be. (Other market forces will work their charms on them, as they already have and do on all of us, to restrain freedom of expression. But
that's another column.) Ultimately, the web will serve individualistic websites as a means of effective distribution. All this talk about the AOL/Time-Warner merger restraining free speech on the Internet is poppycock. The market will, as it always has, be the primary restrainer of speech. There are only so many hours in the day.

Let’s say that Ain't It Cool News is generating $200,000 a year now in ad revenue. That's a lot of money for a guy who didn't have a lot of money. But no amount is never enough for the ambitious. That's no insult at all. That's reality. Why would a guy want $200,000 a year for saying whatever he wants when he could have $2,000,000 a year? So how do you make that leap? You become a key figure on a web network that services so many millions of people that your advertising revenue shoots through the roof on inertia alone. Only on the web, you can do it with a site instead of a single column.

The question is, how many of these "key sites" can the networks maintain before becoming overloaded? Well, about as many as there are major TV brands right now...and a few more to boot. And that's where roughcut comes in. We are a TNT brand. We are big on the Internet, but we aren't big enough to drive a site the size of AOL. That's why EW will be the entertainment brand for AOLTW. But we are still valuable as a brand to the family. We can generate revenue as a brand for a smaller Internet concern like The Turner Networks, which I suspect will be branded within the new AOLTW structure, with NBC as part of it and Ted in charge of the whole thing. Perhaps roughcut will become integrated into the CNN brand, which is massive enough as a news outlet to parent a showbiz arm (or two or more...we don't cover TV or music or theater). Or perhaps we become a true e-commerce site, providing content while the real players compete with Reel.com and Amazon.com and whoever.

And that's the challenge to the mindset of AOL, which I don't think will be all that challenged. What Bob Pittman has brought to AOL was the insight that they were "just a network." The dial-up business was never going to last. And so, under Pittman, the business of AOL shifted to e-commerce and to a simplified magazine environment for its users, who could also go surf the web. They gave you the dial-up, so you were always funneled through AOL...a captive audience. The irony of all of this merging is that AOL will likely end up with a smaller, not a larger, core audience. There are all kinds of ways to generate page views on AOL to make their audience numbers soar into the hundreds of millions in the next 10 years, but I'm talking serious AOL users. If they have 25 million users now, look for them to end up with a core community of 10 million in the future. Another 10 million will "live" at EWO (Entertainment Weekly Online). Another 10 million will "live" at ESPN, another 10 million at CNN and so on and so on and so on. Just as some people read a daily newspaper and nothing else and others read EW and nothing else and others read Sports Illustrated and nothing else and other just watch TV, AOL will be one of the major full service sites on the planet. Safe, soft and efficient. Look for Yahoo! (and whatever media partner they partner with) to make the same adjustment. Search engines will soon be as bad a business as dial-up. Standardization will overcome differentiation because the goal is always the same...find what you want to find.

Anyway... so how does effect me, Al Franken? (Oops, channeling the SNL Channel.) How does this effect me, David Poland? Well, I don’t know yet. I'm not going to be as rich as Harry anytime soon. I am still an employee and his brand is more valuable than my content, no matter how good I get at this. There are a few possibilities. I could end up off on my own, building a DaveSite, looking for an IPO. If I were really smart fiscally, I would already be doing that. But I am loyal to the folks at TNT, who gave me an opportunity and allowed me to eat while I was building a following. I haven't paid them back fully yet. (I hope my mother isn't reading this
because I will get such an angry phone call about undervaluing myself and the fact that TNT wouldn't be paying me if I wasn't worth it to them, and that I've paid my dues by writing 6 days a week for over two and a half years...as much as my sense of honor and duty has cost me over the years, it has also gotten me here, so I will maintain the trust.) So, I will do everything I can for TNT and roughcut.com and for you all, who make it a valuable experience for me and for TNT. And a year from now, or two or three, will I be as valuable a commodity to AOLTW as Harry will be to someone next week? We'll see. I would love to be a millionaire. But I could have been there by now if I prioritized that. I haven't. I have chosen to indulge my passion and intellect instead. For better or for worse.

On the other hand, AOL could do a 3-week analysis of all the Time-Warner sites and talent, and decide that I'm being paid too much and am nothing but an irritant, and fire me tomorrow, replacing me with E! Online columnist Andy Jones.

Don’t laugh. It could happen. If a world values a 15-year-old Internet company that has a 25 million person deep reach by almost 50 percent more than a 75-year-old conglomerate that reaches more than 100 million people each year, anything can happen. Jerry Yang can become Michael Eisner's boss. Think about that. I'm just getting the table scrapings, friends. Hell...even if Harry gets $5 million for AICN...table scrapings.

I'm glad I didn't have anything to say about all this. I could get myself in trouble.

E ME: How do you see the future?