Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  While she was out pitching, she was introduced to Marleen McDaniel, a thirty-year industry veteran, one of the few women at the top of the Silicon Valley food chain. Marleen was a technology industry Zelig: she cut her teeth as a computer girl, a systems analyst and programmer, in the 1960s and spent the 1970s hanging around with the Xerox PARC beanbag crowd. She worked, for a time, with Douglas Engelbart, Jake Feinler’s Stanford mentor, on a failed attempt to commercialize his system. In the go-go years of the 1980s, she joined Sun Microsystems as employee number forty and rode it all the way to the top, “like working on a rocket ship,” she says. By the time she met Ellen, she’d participated in the successful launches of several high-profile startups and was well respected in the valley. Ellen sent her a business plan and a bouquet of flowers.

  At the time, Women’s WIRE didn’t have quite enough subscribers to be solvent, and Ellen had already sunk her life savings into the company. She and Nancy were having a hard time getting through to the VC firms they were meeting with, because most potential investors were men who regarded the notion of a women’s network as little more than a curiosity. “Some got it, of course,” remembers Ellen. But with others, “you’d get the classic, where someone says, ‘I’m gonna have my wife look at this.’ They didn’t really take it seriously as a market or as an opportunity. They would think we were a fringe group.” With Marleen in the picture, however, there was a chance Women’s WIRE would be taken seriously long enough to make their case.

  “It was not easy to raise money for this company,” says Marleen. In her estimation, it wasn’t a gender issue: the Women’s WIRE business plan wasn’t forward thinking, and First Class BBS was on its way out. But the brand had first-comer status, and the idea of using the Web as a commercial medium was still tantalizingly new, so Marleen came on as a consultant. She went out pitching with Ellen and Nancy, but her credibility had an unintended effect. “When I finally got a smaller but high-quality VC firm to make a commitment to it, they did it with the caveat that they wanted me to be CEO,” Marleen says. “So that was the first crisis.”

  Marleen is an inveterate early adopter, the result of a career spanning several generations of computer development. She knew that Women’s WIRE couldn’t survive as both a content destination and a service provider, competing with giants like AOL, which had the resources to mail millions of installation disks to potential new users around the country. Having first encountered the Web in the early 1990s, she knew it was the only play for Ellen and Nancy, despite the risk. “That was a defining moment,” she says, “and in case you think that starting a company is easy—it’s not. This was like jumping off a cliff and having no idea if there’s water.” Only one thing was certain: Women’s WIRE was no longer a community service. It was a media company.

  Soon after, Women’s WIRE announced that it would abandon its stand-alone dial-in service to focus on creating “electronic magazines” for Microsoft, CompuServe, and the World Wide Web. The first big deal Marleen brokered was a multiyear arrangement to divest the Women’s WIRE community from their platform by urging users to switch to CompuServe’s $9.95 monthly plan. This is an opportunity to build a large, diverse, and culturally rich women’s online community, she wrote in a system-wide e-mail announcement. (“They bought our subscribers,” she tells me now.) As these changes rippled through what remained of the original Women’s WIRE community, Nancy walked away from the company, taking an exodus of users with her. “They’re saying it’s a partnership between CompuServe and Women’s Wire,” said one forum moderator of the forced migration, “but it’s clear to me that the Women’s Wire that I signed up for hasn’t existed for several months. This is a shifting away from a community model to that of an information provider.” On Halloween 1995, the old Women’s WIRE modem lines went down.

  Nancy kept mum at the time, but she can’t have been pleased. She came from a generation of early adopters who believed that the Internet was inherently a community technology—to her, subscribers were citizens before they were consumers. Nancy’s old-school, egalitarian vision made no sense to Marleen. “She wanted to run the company,” Marleen says. “Instead of having a CEO and a pyramidal structure . . . she wanted to have sort of a Knights of the Round Table kind of situation.”

  Marleen spent 1995 securing distribution partnerships with companies like MSN, Bloomberg, and Yahoo!, and she and Ellen launched Women’s WIRE on the Web that August. The company’s central online service became a content destination—more magazine than sewing circle, a place where women could get things done, from checking their stocks to reading their horoscopes. Articles written by Women’s WIRE staffers and freelancers were laid out alongside stories pulled from the Reuters newswire, alongside forums on subjects “ranging from Barbie to Bosnia,” as Ellen told one journalist shortly after their launch. For all intents and purposes, Women’s WIRE became a magazine. “The model switched to eyeballs and ads,” says Nancy, and “the emphasis really became just running people through. It didn’t matter how long they stayed, and whether they were engaged or not. It was just selling eyeballs like a magazine.”

  GETTING THERE

  With their first infusion of venture capital, Women’s WIRE moved from South San Francisco to a nicer office in San Mateo. Ellen was deputized to vice president of Product Development, and she spent her time flying back and forth between San Francisco and New York to meet with media partners and hire the team of editors that would run the new, magazine-like Women’s WIRE on the Web. She hired Laurie Kretchmar, a former editor at Working Woman magazine, as editor in chief, and poached Gina Garrubbo, a savvy sales manager, from the Discovery Channel. Gina was converted from the moment she first read Women’s WIRE articles on the Web. “I said, ‘Oh my God,’” she remembers. “They assume women are intelligent. Have money. Are doing their own investment. Are making their own fashion decisions and not wanting to be told what to wear and not to wear. There is no condescension in this voice. I felt that I had never heard this voice in the universe.”

  Not everybody was so quick to see the potential in building a brand for women online. Gina tells me a story about a 1996 investment meeting. “Marleen, Ellen, me, and our CFO go into a bank in Boston, who will not be named,” she says. “We were all dressed in black jackets and black slacks. We all have laptops with us. We walk into this 1980s conference room.” Around the table sat seven bankers: suits, white shirts, power ties. “We start telling them how women are currently not the majority of online users,” Gina remembers, “but will be the majority, how women are going to buy things online, are starting to research things online, and they look at us like we’re mad. This one guy was like, ‘My wife doesn’t even like computers.’ They were thinking, These guys are nuts. And we’re looking at them like, These guys don’t get this at all.” After the meeting, the women walked out onto the street and laughed. It was all they could do.

  The bankers were wrong, and the women knew it. As the 1990s progressed, the Web began to reflect the gender demographics of the real world. Where text-only BBS clubhouses, Multi-User Domains, and newsgroups had been dominated by hobbyists, techies, early adopters, and teenage boys, the Web opened the floodgates for women. By 1998, 39.6 million women were online, and in 2000, the number of women online surpassed that of men for the first time. This shift represented a massive deluge of female users of all ages, leading one prominent market research firm to announce that “it’s a woman’s World Wide Web.” Riding the wave, Women’s WIRE changed its name to women.com.

  “When we jumped off the cliff,” Marleen says, “we had to invent a business model.” That business model was advertising. Women.com was first in the market by virtue of being the first on the market. As one of the only female destinations on the Web, its frank, tech-savvy voice promised a refreshing alternative to grocery store women’s glossies—stuffed then, as they are now, with sex tips and fad diets. Alongside sites like Aliza Sherman’s Cybergrrl.com, a dishy, Gen-X guid
e to cyberspace, and iVillage, a parenting community turned women’s network, women.com represented a new kind of women’s media: sincere, connected, and smart. And for sale.

  Because women controlled more than 80 percent of consumer purchasing, advertisers paid close attention to the growth of the so-called woman’s World Wide Web, and women.com was quick to capitalize. Gina’s team sold the first ad on the Web, a section of the site underwritten by Levi’s. It was what we now call sponsored content: the Levi’s section, “Getting There,” profiled women with cool careers, like Webmasters and private eyes, much as Word’s beloved “Work” section had explored the extremes of the American workplace. In those early days, large brands were eager to advertise online, but there were no standards for pricing, sizing, and terms, and nobody knew how page views translated to advertising impact—but traffic could be measured, and the traffic was good. While the original Women’s WIRE dial-in service had only fifteen hundred paying subscribers, by 1996, women.com was getting 7.5 million hits a month. “We were on the map,” remembers Ellen. “Nobody else had female eyeballs like we had.”

  Like word.com, women.com got an early traffic boost from being featured as one of the Netscape browser’s “What’s Cool” destinations, but its easy-to-remember URL played a role as well. In the years before Google, Web browsing began with a URL typed directly into the address bar. From there, you’d follow hyperlinks on directory sites like Yahoo! or else explore dedicated “link pages” personally curated by a site’s Webmaster (or -mistress). This made a URL like women.com especially valuable: odds were, people would type it into the address bar just to see where it led.

  In 1997, women.com expanded to become a network, with a constellation of interconnected sister sites: Women’s Wire, MoneyMode, StorkSite, Prevention’s Healthy Ideas, Beatrice’s Web Guide, and Crayola FamilyPlay. Three of these were underwritten by sponsors, who paid to partner with women.com and cleave off a slice of its traffic, and after Levi’s, women.com sold more advertising space to Fidelity Investments, Honda, Toyota, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and American Express. According to an industry research firm, it ranked among the most profitable sites on the Web. The Levi’s ad had gone for ten thousand dollars in 1996. Two years later, banner ads and sponsored content were routinely being sold in multiples of a hundred thousand dollars, and, by the end of 1998, in excess of one million dollars a pop. “We built the revenue from nothing to tens of millions of dollars,” says Gina Garrubbo, women.com’s VP of Sales.

  All of this was a long way from Women’s WIRE. If the original business had had spiritual grandparents, they might have lived at Resource One: Women’s WIRE had Community Memory’s organic locality and the Social Services Referral Directory’s social consciousness. Where content on women’s WIRE had “emphasized current news and affairs and encouraged political activism,” women.com was a different animal, and the evolution from one to the other reveals how quickly early efforts to claim online space for women turned into building businesses that sold products to women, and then to the commodification of the women’s Web as a whole. It wasn’t long before women.com, a venture-funded company aggressively seeking advertising money to stay afloat, became indistinguishable from the grocery store women’s magazines to which it had been founded as an alternative. Despite the leap from pulp to pixel, women.com was no more nutritious than Cosmo. In fact, it was Cosmo.

  TWO CARS ON A RACETRACK

  When Marleen and Ellen launched their Web play, they were the only game in town. But the women’s Web quickly grew crowded: in 1998, Geraldine Laybourne, a television executive, announced Oxygen Media, a cable channel with an accompanying Web presence staffed by whip-smart Gen-Xers hired away from indie Web zines. ChickClick, which began as a small network of “grrrlish zines,” became an affiliate network of fifty-eight youth-leaning women’s sites with names like Technodyke and Disgruntled Housewife. But only one competitor kept them up at night: iVillage.

  iVillage’s CEO, Candice Carpenter, was a tough customer in a power suit. “She was scandalously interesting,” Marleen tells me, with a mixture of admiration and something else. Carpenter had grown her venture from an AOL community of kibitzing parents into a thriving knot of seventeen women’s Web sites, underwritten by huge venture capital rounds, corporate alliances, big-money advertising plays, and early ventures into e-commerce. iVillage was built on a community model: its marquee product was forums, where women shared everything from postpartum anxiety and breast cancer stories to advice for managing work stress and unruly teenage children.

  Carpenter knew that community would keep visitors coming back to iVillage and that it boosted the site’s page views, a critical metric in a business with no other discernible assets. iVillage was expert at capitalizing on the repeat traffic its forums encouraged: join a pregnancy support group on iVillage and you’d eventually find yourself on Amazon, browsing baby books, or on one of iVillage’s sister e-commerce sites, like iBaby, picking out rompers. Carpenter, whose résumé included stints at Time-Life Video, QVC, and AOL, spoke of “monetizing” the iVillage community, turning the network’s social dynamics into a business worthy of the stupendous amounts of venture capital it was known for burning through.

  By 1999, iVillage and women.com were “like two cars on a racetrack,” Marleen explains, competing for advertising dollars and prominence on the Media Metrix top fifty, the early Web’s version of Nielsen rankings. “We competed for everything,” says Gina Garrubbo, and in their efforts to outpace each other, iVillage and women.com inched closer and closer to the middle. iVillage, which began as a community site, started publishing articles to lure the content-curious; women.com, seeing the popularity of iVillage’s forums, added more of its own. Laurie Kretchmar, women.com’s longtime editor in chief, puts it more simply. “There’s often two in a category, like Burger King and McDonald’s, Pepsi and Coke,” she says. “Personally, I like Coke.”

  In 1998, Marleen sold a large stake of women.com to Hearst Communications—one vote shy of controlling interest—in exchange for a comprehensive brand partnership. The Women.com Networks, Inc. became host to Hearst’s female magazine brands: Good Housekeeping, Town & Country, Marie Claire, Redbook, and yes, Cosmopolitan. This gave women.com an aura of legitimacy, but made its content indistinguishable from the mass-market media the Web was supposed to be disrupting. By the end of the decade, as the combined result of the Hearst merger and the Web’s explosion as a commercial medium, women.com had gone mainstream, devoting an increasing share of space to its flimsier magazine partners. The puff had sneaked in, irrevocably: “71 Weight Loss Tips That Really Work!” “Mother-in-Law Driving You Crazy?”

  The same thing was happening on women’s sites across the Web. From iVillage to Oxygen, feminism ceded to fluff and political commentary gave way to fad diets, horoscopes, and compatibility calculators. The Web was no longer a reprieve from the pabulum of People magazine; sex and horoscopes drew more traffic than anything else, and “those who thought the Web would be more like Ms. than Mademoiselle—believing that all women were itching for more intellectualism—were probably deluded,” noted one critic, in Salon.

  Early efforts to identify and develop the female Web had an inverse intended effect. As the Canadian scholar and theorist Leslie Regan Shade points out, the more aggressively sites such as women.com and iVillage catered to female readers, the more they pigeonholed them, until all that remained of their communities were consumer demographics and ad clicks. This continues to be an issue today, as online media struggles to balance the conflicting needs of advertisers, subscribers, and readers. In the heady atmosphere of the Web’s early days, however, it seemed particularly grim: women had come online for empowerment and community, and within only a few years they were being sold jeans, baby clothes, and lotion.

  A blistering New York Times editorial sounded the alarm in the year 2000: the commercial success of women’s online media was symptomatic of a “virulent cul
tural separatism,” a corny, insidious “woman’s culture,” spreading everywhere from chick flicks to reality TV to fashion mags, designed solely to trick female consumers into loosening their purse strings. “There’s the ultimate deception,” the Times’s Francine Prose wrote, “the marketing-research-driven con, the appalling bait-and-switch practiced on the woman who is being promised relationship, being sold on community, and who is in fact buying into a progressively deeper isolation and seclusion.”

  FUCKED COMPANY

  One of the most interesting artifacts of the dot-com bubble is a Web site, FuckedCompany.com, that translated Silicon Alley’s meltdown into a game of fantasy sports. Every day, it posted new industry “fucks,” rating each by severity: layoffs, distressing press releases, and empty offices. One hundred severity points and the company was retired to the Fucked Company Hall of Fame, and likely went bankrupt in real life, but bets could be placed on each progressive lurch toward the end. Nervous tech workers used the site as a barometer, and some even played the game themselves. After the turn of the millennium, the only way to make money on the dot-coms was to gamble on the specifics of their demise.

  In December 2000, Fucked Company posted a new notice:

  Women.com, my favorite site for reading about what chicks like, laid off 85 beautiful, bikini-clad ladies.

  Severity: 45

  The women’s Web had been riding high in the late ’90s, selling million-dollar ads and charting unprecedented traffic numbers. Even as cultural observers were lamenting the sites’ descent into puff clickbait, speculative financial interest in the women’s Web was at an all-time high. Like many big Internet businesses of the era, both women.com and iVillage felt the pressure to take that interest to the bank with well-timed initial public offerings.