We San Franciscans think New York isn’t quite as Web savvy are we are. No offense to my BusinessWeek overlords and Silicon Alley pals, but we’re convinced that the smartest, most innovative ideas for using the Internet emanate from this coast, not yours. Heard of Google, anyone?
Here’s the shocker. As the ad recession deepens, it’s a handful of Silicon Alley Web companies that are getting one thing right that many Bay Area companies abandoned years ago: the e-mail newsletter. That’s right. The East Coast is leading the way in showing how to make money from those electronic digests of a site’s content, delivered regularly to your already cluttered in-box.
Daily Candy’s Toothsome Morsel
The most noted success story is DailyCandy.com, purchased by Comcast just before all hell broke loose in the economy last fall. Reportedly, it fetched $125 million. Not exactly a home run in Web terms, but a big win nonetheless.
DailyCandy.com has done well enough that its investors at Pilot Group Ventures in Boston have backed several companies that also use e-mail newsletters, among them the newsletter-for-dudes-who-read-newsletters Thrillist, which is launching in its 10th city, Philadelphia, this month. The co