The Quest for Online Profits

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There is one segment of the Internet industry that's making cash hand over, uh, fist: pornography. Boston-based Forrester Research, a group that monitors trends in high technology, estimates the 1998 profits for the adult online industry at $185 million. The potential power of online media continues to show itself in other ways as well. As many people know, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was brought to light by Matt Drudge, an unabashedly unschooled reporter who publishes the no-frills Drudge Report out of his dingy Hollywood apartment. "I get readers who say they are disenfranchised by the mainstream press, who don't trust it, who don't look for straight faces from corporate editors," Drudge recently told Brill's Content. "So to that respect, I think I'm offering a glimpse of how it can be otherwise."

But the near future of online media seems destined to be shaped largely by the current mania for providing services and fostering commerce. Whether it's books or plane tickets you're looking for, it is now possible to make impulse purchases on the Web, and the online marketplace is growing. "The Web will also overtake newspapers when it comes to publishing classifieds," predicts Lisa Allen, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "Our research shows that the longer folks are online, the more they like looking for cars, jobs, and houses online as opposed to print.”

Many experts say even bigger changes will begin within a year, when sound, video, and animation become central to the online experience. That's surely no surprise at Word, which, after shutting down for several months in 1998, recently relaunched under a new owner, Zapata Corporation, just in time to compete in the online era they anticipated years ago. As Bowe puts it, "What people currently think of as bells and whistles will become the meat and potatoes." In the end it may be that entertainment—not content, not community, not shopping, not any of the other ideas that have had their three hours in the sun—will be king.

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