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Marketing News: The Rebirth of The Industry StandardFebruary 13, 2008 – 4:14 pm |
 Arman Rousta |
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The once mighty must during web 1.0 has returned – The Industry Standard. Starting in 1998 it quickly rose to sell a record 7,558 advertising pages in 2000, making it 300 pages. The unfortunate victim of the dotcom crash it was bought up by IDG in bankruptcy court for $1 million and left to sit till now.
“We found that the brand had quite a bit of equity left,” says Derek Butcher, General Manager of The Industry Standard. “People remembered what the brand stood for before. Still, there’s obviously going to be a new generation of people who have no idea what it is.”
“We’ll have news coverage, but mainly from other sources such as IDG and bloggers,” says Butcher. “The area where we will try to differentiate ourselves is on the analysis side.”
Their motto this time is Predict the Future and they present a new way to consider the future. It’s by getting registered users to predict news stories and even suggest things to predict. Beyond valuable to any internet marketing and analysis.
They give users $100,000 in credits at registration to place yeah or nay bets on stories and new technologies. If things go the way you chose to predict you get more credits. Topics range from what will Yahoo, Google and Facebook do to Ad spending will shift from impression to performance-based marketing in 2008. If you predict correctly you can then apply them to prizes and increase your web cred. “The cool thing about prediction markets is that they do seem to be pretty accurate,” Butcher says. “It’s an effective way of forecasting.”
It seems that TIS is just in time to propel us further towards the next phase of the web or web 3. Building on the web 2.0 social networking phenomenon, folks argue web 3 is shaping up to be a phase of recommendation, customization and with the increased influx of ad revenue formally with television, rich, glossy and fast.
TIS out of the gate, looks and acts great. The site is well designed and implements a lot of the social networking standards we’ve come to enjoy. The bulk of the analysis is top notch and the breadth of the writers is wide and concise. The topics range from what company will be acquired next to what’s new in search engine optimization to technology infrastructure topics.
It should quickly be bookmarked by anyone in the technology industry and those like myself should also register, so you can start predicting. For the ability to predict the future is always valuable for business. To bad the Industry Standard had to go away for all those years.
