I worked on the article below for Personal Democracy Forum. Oh man did I work on it. In the end, they didn’t like it. Funny, because they pitched the idea to me. I guess it’s another lesson learned; your best writing comes from your own ideas. From here on out, I’ll be weary when editors come to me with story ideas that I myself only find half-interesting. But since I worked so hard on the piece below, it would be a shame if it never sees the light of day.
Political Portals
Web portals today are a complete destination unto themselves. But before the dot com bust, portals existed for all kinds of interests, including politics. Today, like ghost towns of the old west, once vibrant political websites lurk in cyberspace acting only as cultural archives, preserving political battles long since passed.
Sites like Voter.com or Speakout.com either lay dormant or have been stripped and sold. But while some political portals have become relics others have emerged from the bubble to dust themselves off and try again. Sites like CandidateCompare lay in waste, while EthePeople has weathered the storm to become an oasis of political discussion long after its heyday.
These sites were once the soup du jour of politics. They were filled with links to the latest news and other useful political resources, maintained by a large staff keeping the site up to date at all times. Sites like Grassroots.com were a one stop destination for anything political on the Web, including contact information for local representatives and chat rooms for political discussions. Other sites like Vote.com included quick questionnaires that helped visitors figure out where they stood on certain issues and let politicians understand their constituents. Each political portal had some kind of tool on their site, like BetterVote.comâ??s search engine that allowed visitors to enter their zip codes to find out about local politicians that were up for election and who best fit their interests. “What it evolved into was almost a dating-type service but instead of finding romance it looked for political compatibility,” said Adam Rentschler, who started BetterVote with his brother in 1999. For the most part early portals were successful too. As Scott Reents, president of EthePeople, points out; “They didn’t fail to get a lot of traffic. They did everything they told their investors they were going to do.”
The hype these sites garnered made it possible for the Rentchler brothers to raise $500,000 from private investors for the launch of BetterVote. In under six months Grassroots forged partnerships with two companies making it possible to build online headquarters for local candidates during an election. Everywhere different sites were raising money and getting attention from the media. Craig Smith and Randy Tate who ran Voter.com even became valued as political commentators the night before the 2000 election.
Despite the hype in the media and with investors, it became painfully obvious by 2000 that things weren’t shaping up as planned. According to a CNET article in May of 2000, Vote.com was the only portal that made it on Media Matrixâ??s radar, racking in 50,000 to 100,000 unique visitors a day. â??Most of the other sites are going to drop dead next year,â? said Dick Morris when interviewed for this 2000 CNET story.
A similar BusinessWeek article found that political portals only had a scant following, citing a Forrester report that found less than half the country was going online for political news, and only a tithe of these eyes were going to portal sites. Politics on the web just hadnâ??t reached maturity by 2000. Even candidate Websites couldnâ??t garner over 200,000 unique visitors during their partyâ??s national conventions. More traditional means of political information, like newspapers and magazines, had too much of a pull on readers for PoliPortals to come out on top, and they still do.
Just this month a Nielson Net Ratings report showed that online news readers are most loyal to major local newspapers like the Washington Times or the Chicago Tribune. With a lack of eyes going to the sites after the election and advertising dollars down there was soon the realization that a lot of investors had overestimated the value of Internet properties. A ton of sites, including GovWorks.com and PoliticalVoices.com – faded into non-existence. Today GenerationVote, which catered to the young voter crowd, is a hotel provider.
The Money Behind It All
As the dot.com bubble expanded, poli-portals didn’t have trouble finding investors. They were either nonprofits, run on a low budget and funded by grants and individuals, or they were for-profit publishing businesses looking to sell advertising space to keep the ship afloat. Each road had its benefits. “The central tension is that if you are a for-profit, people will think you are suspect, versus non-profits who get more credibility but must deal with bureaucrats to
get anything done,” said Rentschler who ran the for profit site BetterVote.com. For profits, like BetterVote, took direct political advertising for local areas that came up when visitors did local searches for politicians. “If you are running for school board and you want to do intelligent advertising you want to only reach your constituencyâ?¦like when they are on BetterVote.com,” explained Rentschler.
The problem was, the advertisers just werenâ??t there. “Nobody was doing political advertising on the Web in 2000. This was before Dean and the blogs,” said Rentschler. Though a growing number of political advertisers are paying attention to the Internet, most political advertisers devote the lionâ??s share of their ad dollars to television and radio. A 2004 Pew research report showed that for every dollar spent on Internet ads during the â??04 presidential campaigns, candidates threw $100 to television ads. While this trend is changing, online political advertising is still in a nescient stage.
As a result most large for-profit sites burned through their investment capital and had to sell the little they had left before it became completely worthless. “We finished with zero money and a bad taste in our mouth. We were ahead of our time and thought it was okay because the world was going to catch up,” said Rentschler. Unfortunately the world didn’t catch up in time. Rentschler and his brother sold the company off for what they could and havenâ??t looked back since.
Surviving the Flood
Arvid Rajan, CEO of Grassroots remembers back in April of 2000 when his organization had to make big shifts in their content focus which saved the company from the bankrupt fate of so many other Websites. Grassroots was no longer a portal to find contact information for politicians, or read up on the latest political news. “Everyone realized they needed to shift gears to survive. We made some tough decisions early on to survive,” said Rajan. Now Rajan describes Grassroots as a boutique public affairs consulting firm, like GetActive, Convio or Kintera, that organize political action.
Grassroots originally employed 60 people. But the change in focus required to cut their staff in half and a complete rehiring. Only six people remain from their days as a political portal. â??Our current website is not intended as a destination â?? itâ??s simply a place that people can visit to learn about our company.â?
Today Grassroots helps to strengthen stakeholder relationships, drive grassroots outreach to key decision-makers, respond to external attacks, raise money and shape public perception of an issue. Essentially Grassroots went from covering politicis as a portal site to participating in the process as a public affairs advocate. Some of their clients include the Sierra Club, Pfizer, the Campaing for Tabacoo-Free Kids and the Republican National Committee.
EThePeople.org made a similar cutback at the end of 2000 when they joined with Quorum.org. They quickly cut back their overhang and changed their focus from a content heavy portal site to a niche site based on user-generated content. “[Now] the site changes every day and yet it doesn’t require constant care and feeding from professional writers and editors,” said Scott Reents. In 2000 EthePeople became a 501c3 funded by over 50 individuals or grants. The money allows the site to act as a public forum, hosting political conversations for its members, who join for free. Today Reents is hesitant to call Ethepeople a â??Portalâ? site, but prefers to think of it as a political niche site. The content comes from political hobbyists who use the site as a public forum. So with the change of once robust portal sites like Grassroots or EthePeople to public affairs groups or user generated sites, where does one go to get their fill of politics? It is one thing to engage in discussion, but another to be able to contact your local politicians or dante money via the Internet, which was once possible to do from portal sites.
The New Form of Action
Blogs and newspapers have certainly stolen a bit of the thunder from political sites, as an increasing majority turn to them to find out the latest political news. But it has been 527â??s like MoveOn.org, that have become the center place for political action. Donating money or shelter for the Katrina relief effort is far easier on MoveOn.org than it is on EthePeople. Moreover, more people visit MoveOn to find out how they can donate time or money to specific causes. Nielson Net Ratings report over 1,000 unique visitors a month to MoveOn, but do not even register how many visit EthePeople. In many ways 527â??s and other nonprofit classifications like 503câ??s have filled in the space that political portals like BetterVote.com left behind. In the 2004 election 527â??s became a powerful advertising force, for better or worse, supporting each candidate.
But are these nonprofit advocacy groups sustainable? They depend on the continual support from individuals and continual visitors. The alphabet soup of tax forms can be confusing at times, but today they are the most persistent sites to be political active with. If people remain engaged in the democratic process then there will always be a place for politically centered websites in some form or other. For now, the dominate form seems to be in nonprofits, who can direct visitors to current information and help them get involved in political activities.
whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest.