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Cyber-Soap Returns From The Dead
An anonymous reader submits "Back in 1995, an experimental "cyber-soap" had a wildly successful launch. With over a million page hits a day (an almost unheard-of amount of traffic at the time), The Spot was named "Cool Site of the Year" in 1995, and by all appearances was a huge success.
As was the case for many projects of the time, though, by 1997 The Spot was gone, another victim of the dot-com bust. However, unlike other dot-com projects, The Spot has been given new life, un der new ownership, and was relaunched in March. Can the Spot, a unique blend of soap opera, blog, and reality show, survive this time around, or is it doomed to end up back in the graveyard of failed websites in which it was first buried seven years ago?"
Yes, but how did American Idol, or anything else, go from zero to hit anyway?
Promotion is everything in media these days. The So, the real question: Will The Spot have enough of an ad budget to get some TV ads to announce the project?
The Spot was one of the first in and first out of the Dot-com era... it was early proof that "Oh, we'll get tons of traffic and then put up ads." business model doesn't always lead to profit.
In fact, I don't quite see where they're going to get funding from this go around either...
Actually, all the explosion of blogs mean is that people love to write about their mundane lives. Whether or not anybody actually reads them is another question altogether.
As if inane, trite blogs/boards/et al., weren't enough - now we're going to get hordes of semi-produced/casted business versions...
I spent all of 5 minutes browsing the spot, and it was blatantly obvoius that most "post" we're little more than product placements. "Amanda" "hears" about how [swedish retailer of semi-disposable furniture]'s got some great(!) stuff - going there now!! The "Kai" character takes up surfing - i.e. goes to a named and praised surf shop (link+logo included of course), the guys at shop X we're awesome!!
So, this is apparantly business' take du jour, on the latest mainstream trends online - we get the likes of the spot and the subservient-chicken. Viral marketing ey? Well, let's start spraying some virus-killing poison then.
I'm so reminded of the ad agency in Gibson's Pattern Recognition it's not even funny.
Wherever and whenever real people try (and do) find each other in - to them - meaningful ways, you can be goddammed sure that advertising leeches will find a way to nestle their way in between them. Gotta get yer earnin' on.
668.5
it died in '99 .com bust
I think that's why they said
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.thespot.com
This is so true. Half the fun of checking out the Spot was hanging out in the message boards and arguing over whether it was real or not.
At the beginning, it was well-done enough that it really was not a slam-dunk either way. It was only in the last 6-9 months or so when it started REALLY coming out that it was an advertising experiment that people lost interest.
For those who weren't active at the time, the best analogy would be the Blair Witch Project, back when it was still a bit "underground". It was just well-done enough and crazy enough the audience was happy to play along, but you wonder why anyone would waste their time making a sequel when all the mystery is sucked out of it.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.