In Web Awards, the Nominees Are . . . Kaput
Web publisher Steven Johnson has been basking in glory ever since not just one but two of his Internet sites were nominated for the vaunted Webby Awards--the hip Internet equivalent of the Oscars. It would be even nicer if both companies were still in business.
Johnson’s acclaimed Feed magazine shut down last month after six years, a victim of dwindling online ad revenue. Plastic.com, a news and discussion site that opened in January, also ran out of funding and is staggering ahead with volunteers.
“It was great to be nominated,” said Johnson, 33. But the irony of the timing isn’t lost on him. “It would be particularly funny if Feed won.” He’ll find out Wednesday night. That’s when offbeat multimedia glitz will fill San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House at the fifth annual Webby Awards, the biggest gathering in the tech world to recognize Internet excellence. The winners are selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, whose 350 members include magazine editor Tina Brown, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and singer Bjork.
The problem of Johnson’s two Web site nominees is a sign of the gaping sinkhole that has opened up under the Internet, sucking down not just the stupid and greedy, but the clever and creative as well.
Blood is flowing from many of the 30 award categories, which include “Activism” and audience favorite “Weird.”
Four of the five News nominees have laid off staff--CNet, CNN, Inside and Salon. Salon’s stock is trading under a dollar, as is the parent of Community nominee ChickClick.com.
Popular Power, a Technical Achievement nominee for its programs to harness idle computers for complex calculations, closed in March, a month before the nominations were announced.
“I just learned about the nomination a week ago,” said Popular Power co-founder Nelson Minar, 29, of San Francisco. “I find it very touching, frankly.”
This year’s Webby Awards program is the first to confront the economic downturn that has decimated the high-tech world. In years past, revelers wearing fruity-colored feathered hats and goofy dot-com costumes partied their hearts out in celebration of the digital revolution.
This time around, even the thousands of invitations for the event look wistful. They are emblazoned with this year’s theme: “Do You Still Believe? We Do.”
“We’ve all felt the pain in the last year,” said customarily vivacious Webby director Tiffany Shlain, who started the awards for a technology publishing firm in 1997.
There are many tales of woe among this year’s nominees, although the sense of innovation and creativity remains strong.
Popular Power, begun by Minar and a college friend early last year, was the first to release a commercial program to weave together PCs over the Internet or in corporate networks for mass number-crunching. Similar programs now are being used to analyze genes and to look for life in outer space.
While Popular Power quickly won big customers, venture capital firms wouldn’t invest after the stock market began tanking. The money eventually ran out.
“The opportunities are nowhere near what they were,” said Minar, now working as a consultant. “There’s a lot of innovation that is going to be stifled.”
Unlike venture capitalists and Nasdaq investors, the Webby judges don’t select winners based on their financial prospects. They look for technical and creative merit.
Even so, a spot check on the health of the 71 previous winners proves sobering.
Five are gone or dysfunctional, including Napster, the innovative but illegal song-swapping service whose founder, Shawn Fanning, was greeted last year with a thunderous standing ovation.
Fourteen have been bought since their awards. Two have shares under $1 and are facing delisting from the stock market.
At least 16 have had significant layoffs. Nineteen survivors never intended to make money in the first place, such as PBS.org, Adbusters.org and Exploratorium.edu.
Only 28 appear to be alive, well, and for-profit, at least in theory.
Of those, the majority come in two types. Some are owned by giant conglomerates that can easily afford a Web effort, like past Television winner MSNBC.com, a joint venture of Microsoft and General Electric’s NBC.
Such consolidation upsets many longtime Web enthusiasts . Four companies accounted for more than half the time spent online in the U.S. in March, down from 11 companies in 1999.
Most of the other Webby survivors are on the opposite end of the spectrum, run by tiny firms or hobbyists. The guys behind 1998 Weird winner Bert is Evil (that’s Bert from Sesame Street) weren’t exactly counting on an IPO windfall.
To some, the shakeout’s concentration on the middle tier gives some reason for hope.
“We weren’t in this industry to be get-rich-quick millionaires,” Shlain said. “This makes us return it to the community of people who really believe in technology.”
Shlain compared the Internet roller coaster to the film business. Hundreds of movie studios competed for years, then consolidated into a handful of super-powerful companies.
Then came a small but growing rebellion, the Sundance Film Festival and the rise of independent movie-making.
A similar comeback will be even easier on the Web, she said, because it’s cheaper to operate there.
“It’s like a return to the roots this year,” Shlain said. “There are tons of small, awesome indie, grass-roots sites, and we get to shower some attention on them.”
Take Activism nominee VolunteerMatch.org. It links do-gooders with opportunities, a use of the Web that, in retrospect, makes a lot more sense than selling dog food over the Internet.
One nominee with mixed feelings about the collapse is Leif Utne, managing editor of the Utne Reader magazine’s Web site.
“It’s definitely a relief to see so many snake-oil salesmen be sent packing, but I also know some good people who lost their shirts,” he said. “It is unfortunate to see good content disappear as well.”
Even some people at dying sites are philosophical, including Feed’s Johnson.
“Maybe I should be a bit more depressed about all this,” he said. “But never having played into the we’re-taking-over-the-universe camp, it seems to me a regrettable, but probably deserved, backlash that will hopefully be followed by something more sensible.”
Johnson said there’s ample room for optimism. Web publishing is still cheaper than print, and it is much better for allowing people to interact.
That was the idea behind Plastic.com, which accepts articles contributed from other publications, then arranges commentary around how readers rank the feedback.
By the time Plastic’s parent firm ran out money, it had received free software from technology news site Slashdot.org, which allowed Plastic to practically run itself. Most contributors now are able to post stories without going through an editor.
The Internet bubble encouraged that sort of experimentation. And it created a mass audience.
“There’s an unbelievable number of people online,” Johnson said. “What the VCs [venture capitalists] did was fund a giant Web education campaign. They got 50% of the population to understand what hypertext is.”
The true believers of the Web are confident that sooner or later, that experience will pay off for everyone.
In the meantime, another strain of Webby nominee has emerged: companies that specialize in tracking the demise of the high-tech world.
Call it dot-com death-care.
The Humor category has a well-known but unprintable nominee that sponsors a contest in which players try to pick the biggest dot-com loser they can think of. If the company goes down or suffers a major setback, players win points. The site’s name is similar to “Failedcompany.com.”
