Where The Action Is

Word-of-mouth, not hype drives new city guides' success

SFGate - Glenn Helfand

In Internet culture, big used to be better. The idea was that Web space is limitless, a free frontier, open for the taking, capable of storing vast libraries worth of information. When you launched a Web site, there was almost an obligation to include everything possible and to toot your own horn loudly so everyone could hear.

Take city guides, for example -- sites like the defunct Microsoft-backed Sidewalk and the extant Citysearch (which bought Sidewalk) that provided a comprehensive way of engaging with a city, like a Yellow Pages telephone book crossed with a travel guide. To combine current listings with a database of urban resources of all sorts is a hefty proposition, and daunting in scale and cost.

Of course, it's not surprising that such guides are having a hard time living up to the task -- or to the hype. It didn't take long for Sidewalk to sell to Citysearch, which these days may be something of an institution, but one buffeted by an erratic economy. According to a recent article in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, Citysearch is slumping. Its earnings dropped 41.3 percent in the first quarter of 2002, to $7.3 million from $12.4 million a year ago. The reason: a poor advertising climate.

Yet, somehow, in a shrinking world, there's some growth and evolution in the realm of Internet-based city guides. Mind you, they're smaller in scale, more concise in content, increasingly grassroots-style and invariably concentrating on e-mail missives. Oh, and they seem to be operating with a lucid business ethos that's quite the opposite of early Web-business disasters. Projects like the recently launched Flavorpill and Daily Candy and the queer-centric SCUM have tweaked the model by paring down cultural-events information and delivering it to an audience that comes to them and asks for it.

Flavorpill is a memorable moniker for a new e-mail-based city guide, one that essentially functions as a very digestible weekly hot list of stylish, sometimes off-the-radar cultural events -- electronic-music happenings, fashion shows, exhibitions, readings, etc. -- delivered via e-mail to anyone who signs up for the service on its Web site (www.flavorpill.net). Though the weekly lists are available on the site, the URL is only a conduit -- Flavorpill is viewed by its producers as primarily an e-mail publication. What sets this apart from other e-mail lists, like the revered Squidlist, a funky, SF-based post-it-yourself community clearinghouse of underground arts events sent to subscribers twice weekly, is that Flavorpill is tightly edited and highly designed and has aspirations to evolve and expand into a profit-making business.

In fact, Flavorpill's S.F. edition, which launched this May, is its second city guide. The project began in New York, where its three-person headquarters is located. Since the middle of 2000, it's been sending out e-mails to smart, trendy Manhattanites and has managed to garner corporate advertising sponsorship for the project. San Francisco is the first branch in an international hip-city network that will include Los Angeles, London and Miami before the end of the year.

While Flavorpill is ambitious in scope, its numbers are humble. The New York e-mail list hovers at 27,000, while the San Francisco subscriber base is 3,000 -- lists developed virally, without any advertising or marketing push. The organizers, having learned lessons from the dot-com frenzy, are attempting to keep things small -- bare-bones staff, low overhead, reliance on volunteer labor, self-sufficient digital publishing tools. By beginning modestly and hoping to grow into a viable business, the project reverses the old startup strategy of launching venture-capital big and crumbling quickly.

Interestingly, Flavorpill grew out of an e-commerce site called netsetgoods.com, a somewhat typical boom-era startup with the vision of selling high-end "lifestyle essentials" that charted some trendy ground between Barney's and Urban Outfitters. While the site got a lot of attention and kudos for its design sensibility, like most e-commerce endeavors, it was shaky in the revenue department.

"To attempt to keep things exciting, we took our existing database of New York City tastemakers and we started sending out e-mail updates about parties," says Sascha Lewis, who along with Mark Mangan and Husani Oakley founded both Netsetgoods and Flavorpill. "The idea was to update audiences to promote sales. Needless to say, it didn't save the business."

Tapping into the self-selected hipster mailing list, however, evolved into something promising. After the trio shut down their e-commerce business in earnest, they began to evolve a new, pared-down strategy. For a few months, they continued to send out text-based e-mail alerts to their mailing list, and then they began to think of that information as a product, like a magazine, and began to seek advertising-type support. (The Flavorpill team also has an income-generating side business called Sublit, a marketing company that specializes in handling e-mail interactions between businesses and consumers.)

The New York edition of Flavorpill features single monthly sponsors, companies such as Bloomberg, the American Express/Tribeca Film Festival, Absolut, Puma and Evian. "They're the lifestyle brands we think fit with our aesthetic," says Lewis, who admits he was in real estate before hitching on to the dot-com bandwagon.

This sponsorship model is a close cousin of the banner-ad system, differentiated -- however mildly -- by the idea that a single business, rather than many, is represented each month. This strategy, Lewis says, suggests that the advertiser has made some kind of cultural commitment to the project, perhaps following Absolut's 1980s practice of carpet-bombing hip lifestyle magazines. "The advertiser is going to approach it more like a print-style campaign rather than a Web campaign," Lewis explains. "It's been an interesting progression; there's been some hesitancy. We had to break the mold."

The business goal, Lewis admits, is that the sponsorships can be applied across markets to the international lists of Flavorpill addicts, but as of yet the San Francisco lists haven't attracted sponsorships.

Flavorpill isn't the only site entering into this territory. The like-titled Daily Candy (www.dailycandy.com) follows a similar, if more commercial, city-list model. This bicoastal business, with specific content for New York and Los Angeles, is a daily, fashion magazine-style bonbon delivered each morning to subscribers' e-mail boxes. Where Flavorpill goes for outré DJ events or underground parties, Daily Candy is all about tartly written buzz on the latest chic eatery, new facial techniques, a manicure bargain or, as its own breathless ad copy boasts, letting readers know "the first day peonies appear in the farmer's market."

That bit of colorful news is accompanied by a banner ad from a single sponsor -- a spirits company, a cosmetics corporation or another suitably upscale business. Twice a month, Daily Candy sends out a dedicated e-mail with some kind of offer from a tony retailer -- a 50 percent-off special at Neiman's, an Armani fall preview, that kind of thing. In a sense, the Daily Candy is a fashionable city rag doled out in practical bite-size morsels.

"We clearly state that an advertiser made it worth the readers' while," says Daily Candy founder Dany Levy. "We always explain that this is our way of staying afloat, since we can't charge our readers for content. But the funny thing is, a lot of people really like getting those sponsored e-mails."

Levy developed her project based on her ideas of how people actually use e-mail information. "I felt there were too many big e-mail newsletters," she says. "Daily Candy is meant to be one small, concise bit. I used to work in magazines, and I got the name from the idea of eye candy, of how people read magazines on the subway. That kind of attention span is what e-mail's perfect for."

The service launched in March 2000, and about 100,000 people nibble on N.Y. and L.A. editions of Daily Candy, with 400 new subscribers added each day. A London edition is coming soon, and Levy says she's pondering which city to target next; San Francisco is under consideration (though she admits there are already plenty of S.F. subscribers to the L.A. mailing).

Things definitely seem to be growing from the ground up. Levy claims it's a profitable business in less than two years. But the combined staff of the East Coast and West Coast offices is modest: just six, plus a stable of freelance writers. "I'm just about to hire a CEO," Levy adds proudly.

It's difficult to know whether S.F., land of the free, the unedited and the nonprofit, is ready for something like this in a time of nesting and retrenchment. Here, commercial-free community Web resources like Craigslist (which charges only for job listings) delivers, as does Squidlist, a free e-mailed compendium of underground-ish events, and these endeavors have flourished in the Bay Area and become cultural institutions, thriving on their ad-free integrity.

Squidlist, for example, is supported through the resources of Laughing Squid (www.laughingsquid.com), the server company that runs it. "I was courted by businesses to provide content during the boom," says proprietor Scott Beale. "But that kind of arrangement doesn't ever work." Beale also prides himself on the fact that Squidlist events are usually the kinds of arty, political or fetishy things that never even make it into the Bay Guardian. "We rarely post anything from SFMOMA," he adds. "They don't need us."

A more recent, and perhaps slicker, entry into this community-based market is SCUM (www.scum-online.com), which targets lesbian and gay culture hounds and gives them a rich, user-generated list of interesting events. An offshoot of the irreverently successful Guerrilla Queer Bar (GQB) (www.geocities.com/guerrillaqueerbar) , an e-mail list of about 2,500 used to generate quick queer happenings like a drag-queen invasion of a Marina watering hole or a bus tour of bars in Daly City, SCUM is a blog-driven, democratic forum for getting the word out on a transgender theatre piece, a benefit sex party or a midlife gay mixer. The listings, sent in digest format twice a week, can be accessed via Web site or e-mail, and both SCUM and GQB are grassroots affairs that look marvelously slick.

(As of June 25, Yahoo/Geocities is no longer carrying GQB, due to "obscene and objectionable content.")

"E-mail can be a good marketing medium, but you gotta have something to make people [want to open it]," says Brian McConnell, a founder of the Urban Anthropology Institute, the corporate "parent" of both GQB and SCUM. "What made GBQ work was because there's a large audience of people bored with gay bars in SF. Our e-mails offered an alternative."

SCUM's name, an acronym for "Sub Cultural Urban Marketing," is a term adopted by some advertising firms aiming to sell booze and cigarettes to gays and lesbians through "underground" networks such as gay bars, and it directly reflects its founders' savvy about marketing strategies. The goal here, however, seems to be more community based.

"Online communication is a very good fit for event-related information, because every reader has their own biases about what is "cool," "interesting," etc.," McConnell says. "What we wanted to do is make it easy for people to see, at a glance, what is happening around town and to view and post comments about these events. One of the problems I have with most event guides, especially in print, is they always turn into a self-appointed elite that decides what is cool enough to merit their attention. The Internet allows you to create a medium that is much more open, yet has enough adult supervision to prevent it from turning into chat-room blather."

SCUM users can create their own event listings by filling out an online form; the information will be posted there and also made available to other community sites. Additionally, the service has a seriously cute "Make a Date" feature that allows like-minded strangers to hook up via e-mail to go to kooky events like cat shows.

It's surprising to learn that McConnell basically runs the fairly extensive project for $200 a month, a sum he absorbs into his telecommunications business. (As with Flavorpill, SCUM's writers are unpaid.). "That's the bright side of technology," he says. "It's so cheap now that, if you're clever, you can build a really sophisticated system for not much money. Not to toot my horn, but from a technology perspective, SCUM compares favorably with much larger sites with much larger development budgets."

"We could make money off it if we really wanted to," McConnell adds. "People are interested in SCUM precisely because it's not commercial. What we're hoping it'll do is inspire others to get their own events going." The latter is a goal perhaps shared by all aforementioned, modestly scaled projects, and it's both wonderfully civic minded and graciously large.