Transcript from Adam Smith Money Show - One year ago
April 28 1998
JOHN DeNATALE: [voice over] Last year, on-line ad sales were
about $1 billion.
BILL BASS: That is roughly the amount of revenue that the Boston
Globe makes every year. So this is an entire industry where you have
Disney and Time Warner and everybody chasing after the amount of
money that a decent-sized newspaper makes in a year.
JOHN DeNATALE: [voice over] Webzines may not be great content
moneymakers, so what about other models? There is one other
interesting model that's making a lot of sense to people here at epub,
makers of another major content area - games.
At their site, Uproar.com, you can play games and chat with people
who are playing games against you. You can also win a few bucks and
prizes. The result?
DAVID BECKER, President, e.pub: Most web sites have visits that
are measured in matters of minutes. Two or three pages are viewed and
then somebody's gone - not a lot of time to see an ad banner, much less actually do something with it. With our site, people spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour.
JOHN DeNATALE: David Becker is the president of e.pub. And
prizes aren't the only giveaways - the company is also giving away its
content.
DAVID BECKER: What we do is we go out to sites around the
world and around the country and say to them, ''Would you like free
content?'' ''Well, sure.'' ''How about a game?'' ''Oh, even better.''
'What if we took that game and for every person that came through,
plays that game and then actually registers, we'll give you 50 cents.
What do you think of that?'' ''I want to know more.''
So now we actually have a situation where 3,000 different sites that are taking our games, much the same way that television is all about the syndication world. We are actually syndicating products all over the net to become ubiquitous.
JOHN DeNATALE: [voice over] Uproar will eventually attach ads to
the games they give away. For now the money is in luring in new
players to the Uproar site.
DAVID BECKER: Then once they're there and they've registered
and given us information, we can then go back and market to them and
slowly draw them into the community.
BILL BASS: Because the Internet traffic is so diffuse, spread all over
the Internet, it is much easier to diffuse your content so that it's but where all the people are than it is to bring you- bring people back into a single site.
JOHN DeNATALE: [voice over] Is Uproar the winning formula? On
the web these days, only one thing seems certain - it's no game for
amateurs. Jack Rifkin, who sits on the board of 24-7, put it this way.
JACK RIFKIN, 24/7: This is a very different period from where
we've been before. This was a kid's game; it's no longer a kid's game.
This is an adult game right now and there's not playing around.
This section was only a part of the full show.
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