Perhaps his experience as chief executive of the unsuccessful year-old MCI Communications Corp and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Ltd Internet Ventures alliance (CI No 2,838, 2,926) taught Scott Kurnit that online content development is best left in the hands of the Internet community, because that principle is the cornerstone upon which his new venture, the […]
Perhaps his experience as chief executive of the unsuccessful year-old MCI Communications Corp and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Ltd Internet Ventures alliance (CI No 2,838, 2,926) taught Scott Kurnit that online content development is best left in the hands of the Internet community, because that principle is the cornerstone upon which his new venture, the Mining Company, is built. The Mining Company, which is funded by corporate and private interests, launched itself as a new Internet business model last week. That means it is designed to compete with both search engines like Yahoo and Excite as well as proprietary online content providers, like America Online Inc and CompuServe Inc. The money will come from advertising, which is sold and managed by the Mining Company, but the content comes from anyone on the Internet who wants to participate and who meets the company’s qualification criteria. Kurnit, chief executive of the new company, says it is based on an affiliate concept: affiliates qualify by doing things like promising to update a column once a week, answer electronic mail within 24 hours, sit in on chat rooms on a regular basis and so on. Affiliates would propose site ideas or would fit into existing slots, like the Seinfeld site for example. Once they’ve been signed on, they re- design their site according to the Mining Company’s template, for a consistent look and feel. Individual sites are given 40% of total advertising revenues, based on the number of hits they get, but Kurnit figures that most affiliates will not maintain their sites as a full-time job. Users searching on the Mining Company’s site would first be shown relevant affiliate sites, and then be given Alta Vista search results. Right now the Mining Company has 160 affiliates signed up. Kurnit says there will be about 500 when the site launches in April. He hopes to have 4,000 within two years. The site is at http://www.miningco.com
