Feed Magazine

Where did the idea for Feed come from?

Steven (Johnson) had been working with some friends developing a site for them and met with one of the early prototypical Web development shops. They asked if he wanted to be editor of their magazine. He said no thanks, but I have sort of this idea for my own. And he kind of came up with a version of the idea for Feed that he sent out to some friends. I was one of them, and I didn't know him very well. We were both covering new media technology at the time. I had an occasional column in The Wall Street Journal. I saw his proposal, and I knew it was a matter of time before I was going to start doing multimedia stuff. I was pretty clear about what was going to work and what wasn't. I had just written a piece about the Web. So when I saw his proposal, I felt like it kind of covered all of the right bases, and it seemed like a good vision of what was possible at that stage, and what I could bring to the venture in terms of my own knowledge and background and contacts. So that's kind of how it got started, and I said, "This looks great. Let's go for it." Ten weeks later, we had a Web magazine.

What, in that original proposal, was different from what was already available on the Web?

Really the thrust of it was really good writing. It was sort of grounding a publication in really good writing, rather than in some sort of notion that it was derived from the technology itself. It was more like let's bring good writing onto the Web, these are the areas that we want to cover, instead of some of these more kind of "hypertexty" formats. Everything else seemed to lack an editorial voice, practically. Hotwired was out there, and even though it was somewhat different than Wired, it was clearly in the spirit of Wired. Urban Desires was the only other thing that was qualified as a magazine with a coherent vision. But it was a lot more artsy and kind of downtown and a little bit more obscure – not as tied into the news cycle as we are.

You had to get some early investors to get the idea off the ground?

Yeah, it was friends and family. It was a very tiny first round.

Then Esther Dyson got involved. How were you able to attract her?

She's an investor. She came in in a round where a bunch of other people did –

including Brian Horey (?) – who are also pretty prominent on the scene here. I think she probably has the biggest national reputation, but there are some others that have been really critical to the new media community. And basically there's a program that the New York New Media Association runs called Angel Breakfast Series, and they do a lot of pre-screening. But if you make it through all their screenings, you can do this 10- or 20-minute pitch in front of this group of angels that gathers once a month. I think the network has actually grown since we presented. And so Esther was at that breakfast, along with David Horowitz and Francine Summer and some others, and she asked some good questions, and decided ultimately to invest.

As you said, value is what's driving Feed, rather than a commercial motive. Did you just assume that the dollars would just naturally follow?

I don't think we ever had dreams of a multi-million dollar idea by the year three, but we definitely assumed that we'd be able to make a go of advertising revenue and other revenue streams at some point.

How has the business model panned out?

We're just at the point where we have some more of the business infrastructure. Our ad salesperson is coming on tomorrow. She's our first full-time person working in-house on ad sales. The advertising community is far more receptive to advertising, obviously, than it was when we began. And we're also branching out into doing syndication deals with print publications and potentially online publications as well. You know, I think given the age of the medium, it's going fine. I think we'll have a better sense of the answer to that question in two more years. But I still think the Web's very young and the difference in the Web and some of the other media that have developed is that barriers to entry are so low that you get many, many media outlets who the advertising dollars. Well the advertising dollars have grown and so have the outlets. So I think there will be a continual winnowing down of publication and a continued growth of advertising dollars. So I do expect it to be viable. But, you know, in the magazine industry people don't expect profitability for five years. We're in year three. So if you look at it in those terms, and look at where our numbers are taking us, I think we're in good shape.

If revenue isn't your number-one concern, how do you measure success?

Profit growth and influence, sort of visibility across other media.

What kind of growth are you experiencing?

Our traffic is up 600 percent [during 1998]. We're still small if you look at a search engine, but our numbers are now much healthier. We've done very little — almost zero — actual paid-for marketing. All of our marketing and promotion has been through some form of bartering or content for banners. It becomes a facet of a bigger deal. So given that we've never paid for like an AOL link or major links elsewhere, I'm very pleased with our growth. And it's up obviously tremendously from the beginning of the year.

How about in terms of profit growth?

We're a ways away from profitability, but given where our costs are … we've grown really aggressively for us this year, which means that we went from five to 10 people. And I think we're going to slow down the growth, which means profitability might be later in 1999.

Do you think other sites are realizing the value of content?

Yeah, it takes a lot of different forms. I mean a lot of people would like to think that only translates into financial quotes and up-to-the minute news, and I don't think that is the case. I also think the definition of value is broad enough that I think there's still going to be some figuring out of what is valuable enough to keep people coming back for a long enough time in great enough numbers.

You recently launched the 4.0 version of your Web site. What were you trying to accomplish with the changes?

There are two things going on. One was a facelift for the site. It needed a clearer structure based more on topic than certain editorial categories that were holdovers from the beginning of Feed. So we basically organized it so if you want to read about technology, you can go to the technology area. If you want to read about media and culture, you can go to the media and culture area. Or if you aren't so interested in Feed stories, but you want to be mostly involved in the community and want to hang out with all of these super-smart readers, you can do that. So from the reader perspective, I think there's a lot more clarity.

It also allows us to work with partners more easily because if we're working with a search engine and they want to link to our breaking technology stuff, it's a much easier way of approaching our site and any sort of relationship we might have with a number of different kinds of companies both online and off.

Finally, and perhaps more significantly in some ways, we did a pretty thorough editorial overhaul, and you're just beginning to see that because we've been a bit backlogged on production. But we basically have a whole new suite of content. Most of it is recurring features of recurring columns, so we're going to be publishing more regularly by certain people, and it'll be a more predictable set-up. So you know that Mondays are the days the columns run, and Fridays are usually interviews. And then other features are more clearly defined.

You touched a bit on the partnerships that you're trying to form. That's a common theme on the Web. What do you think are the keys to landing such relationships?

Having a good product and knowing who to talk to are certainly two of them. And I think also being realistic about what value you bring to the partner, and vice versa. We just did something like this. Our first dialog excerpt is running in this week's Industry Standard, and to us that was a really clear fit. We cover technology in a slightly quirky way that tends to not be as available in your more obvious outlets, and our interests are very much in line with theirs. So every month, they're going to excerpt one of our technology dialogs.

You and Steven both maintain a hand in the editorial end of the business, as managing editor and editor-in-chief (respectively). What are your roles in the business end of the company?

We're still doing all of the management. We have help on the business development front; we've been working with new consultants and they've been executing a series of strategic plans and working to close deals. We had outsourced advertising, and as I said, that's going to be back in-house, and we will be managing that. We do meetings; we deal with our investors and work with them quite closely. They're quite helpful. And we do all the operations management ourselves. So we're really hybrid editors/general managers.

Do each of you have clearly defined roles or is it up for grabs?

We have a certain focus editorially, but a lot of the other stuff is less clearly defined because it's project-by-project. Steven will take the lead on one kind of alliance, and I'll take the lead on another. He does early-stage negotiating really well, and I do later-stage negotiating, so we're sort of a tag team. Ultimately, we will bring in some more management because we're getting big enough to justify that. That is down the line quite a bit, but I think when the company is really to scale, we'll want that and that will free us up even more to do editorial.

Since value is so important, how do you attract top-notch writers?

For some reason, we've always been able to do that, even in the beginning when we didn't even have a reputation. I think it's partly because the quality of the writing at Feed speaks for itself, and once you start with that, it's easy to build on it. And I think we tend to ask them to do interesting projects, so it's not like, "Write the standard piece that you write for everyone else." Usually they're pieces that are in a new format or let them follow up an obsession that they have.

A lot of writers come to us, and we do go after writers. It's more that we would like to work with someone, and we call them up. Sometimes they say yes, and sometimes they say no.