Portal-Crazed NBC Plans Must-Snap! TV
New York -- You lose "Seinfeld" and the NFL, pay "E.R." stars armored trucks of cash, and feel the slipping of audiences to cable, the Internet, horseshoes tournaments, and walks in the park. You're NBC and you're feeling desperate. The only nonsensical sensible thing to do is buy the laggard, bargain-basement, clearance-sale portal, Snap! Online. CNET chief Halsey Minor could barely hide his enthusiasm at dumping the service that was burning through CNET cash like Monopoly money.
But what lies ahead for the Peacock portal, how will NBC promote it on the air, and what astounding synergistic moves can we expect from the snappier NBSnap!? Well-placed 3MR sources in New York and San Francisco have posed as cameramen's assistants and have learned the future plans for leveraging the hell out of this deal of two unequals:
* New fall TV show called "k|net"
Seinfeld's Michael Richards (a.k.a. Kramer) plays a wacky, out-of-place Silicon Valley CEO who goes from one crazy idea to the next, but somehow keeps the company afloat accidentally. He wants to create a cable channel devoted to vintage clothing, but when he starts associated Web sites "for fun," he becomes a multimillionaire by registering the domain name "clothing.com."* NBC celebrities help you surf the Web
Snap! updates its guide to the Web with NBC celebs giving recommendations in each section: "Frasier" star Kelsey Grammar in Psychology; announcer Dick Enberg in Hair Replacement Techniques; "Friends" star Jennifer Aniston in B-Movies; and Jay Leno in Bad Internet Humor.* New fall Silicon Valley setting for "Working" TV show
Fred Savage's show about "life in the corporate rat race" takes a turn for the strange when he gets a job in the Valley. His new workplace wants to charge him to bring a date to his Christmas party, paints the walls a distracting bright yellow, and makes him fill out special forms if he takes longer lunch breaks. Though he wants out, he decides to stay when they offer to feed him free pizza lunches.* Change of Snap! categories, searches
For further slogan synergy, the portal will change section names to Must-See Business, Must-See Sports, Must-See TV Reruns, Must-See Pornography, and Must-See Sites for the Blind. Searches will now bring up associated or irrelevant links to MSNBC, NBC.com, NBC's Interactive Neighborhood, CNBC.com, NBC local affiliate sites, and Conan O'Brien's resume.We must begrudgingly move the Snap! horse in DeathRace 2000 down from the glue factory's door. However, the possibility remains that it could be axed in the 1999 NBC fall interactive season -- or when portals become passe (any day now)...
********** DeathRace 2000(tm)
[each week we'll highlight the lowlights at one of three failing online ventures: Snap!, HotWired and Slate]
Slate Regains the DeathRace Lead
With Snap! getting money from sugar-daddy NBC, and HotWired supposedly nearing profitability (we'll believe it when we see the receipts), that leaves Microsoft's pricey Slate site in the worst shape. Still, Slate says it has reached 20,000 subscriptions so far. A piece in the Wall Street Journal Interactive said:
"...General-interest sites such as Slate aren't giving up on subscriptions. But that publication's decision points to one of the trickier strategic questions Web publishers have pondered: Can a site recover in subscription revenue what it will initially lose in ad revenue by shutting out nonpaying subscribers? Slate, for one, now claims about 20,000 paying readers, down significantly from the roughly 170,000 that visited the site in a normal month prior to the move to subscriptions."
Wired News even detailed a funny Slate promo in a piece showing the "cute and fuzzy and Hallmarkian" direction of Microsoft to soften its image:
"A Microsoft press release today [June 8] urges Father's Day shoppers to 'forget the ties and tools' and get dad a subscription to Slate, the company's online journal of news and commentary. If buyers act now, they can enter to win one of five free WebTV Plus systems, complete with a wireless keyboard and one free month of service, 'so dad can view Slate magazine on TV! (Exclamation theirs.)"
No word on whether dad has the patience to sit through reading Slate while "60 Minutes" is on another channel...
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"3-Minute Roast" is a weekly, advertisement-free, opinionated rip on anything that strikes our fancy in the online world.Max Schlickting - Editor-in-Chief
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