Q&A with John Lee of UrbanExpose - Adam Heimlich Q&A ...

John Lee, aka Crispus Attucks, erstwhile Master of Deception and stalking panther of the urban-online space, is a big, black pussycat once you buy him some pumpkin cheesecake and get to know him. This interview took place at UrbanExposé's authentic Underground Railroad offices, in downtown Brooklyn.

What's your view of the crossroads that content-based sites are at now?

Right now it's all about Big Media, the already-established media companies. It looked like the only road to profitability was going offline with your content. Being able to go vertical, propagate to print, television and film. Obviously the easiest way to do that is to be a partner with a big media company. None of the urban portals seemed like they were going to blow up into a multi-tiered entity?We have to see what's going to be the first Web property to successfully go from strictly a Web play to a magazine, books, television. Nerve did some books. Matt Drudge got a tv show. He got kicked back?

You think that's going to come from one these partnerships?

Unfortunately, with the exception of BET.com [which was sold, with the rest of BET, to Viacom], all the pure Internet ventures have been folded back up into their media parents. Like Go.com folded back into Disney, AOLTW is not going to spin anything off? They don't care about the site being a separate entity because it's not going to go public. And if it already went public, they pulled it back in and bought the shares back. [They're saying, in effect, that it] can't survive on its own. The advertising dollars are split up among so many different sites. The advertisers didn't get the results they wanted. The results they got probably weren't quantifiable, unfortunately.

Few were thinking of competing with Big Media while carrying low costs.

Remember when they said the Web was going to be the revolution of cheap publishing? That shit costs more to produce than fuckin' tv shows! I read that fuckin' Go.com cost 24 million dollars to design! A lot of these urban sites cost 2-5 [million dollars]. You could've done five fuckin' pilot shows, and one of them would have sold! It's crazy. But obviously v.c.'s weren't going to give you money to do five tv shows?no chance for an IPO. They felt they could build 100-million-dollar businesses. And they very well could have. Obviously BET turned into a three-billion-dollar business. Obviously the market is there. It's just that even the best-laid plans can come to ruin. Managing a business is a big thing and I don't pretend to judge anybody?everybody makes mistakes.

Can a content site thrive on just ad revenue?

It can work. You've got to have low costs, though. If someone gave you $10 million to start a site, a quarter-million in revenue is nothing. If you operate at $100,000 a year, a quarter million in ad sales is fuckin' love. Some sites have no salaries! Matt Drudge is one guy.

What do you think of Slate?

Slate? Zzzzzzzz. Those guys are smarter than I am, so I don't wanna fuck with them. They said, Let's start a magazine that's more pretentious than The New Yorker, more bland than The New Republic?that's what it is, a fuckin' slate. That shit is so fuckin' boring. It's like, Let's get a bunch of guys who are completely out of touch with day-to-day life and regular people and get them to write their opinions about stuff. There's no way Joe Schmoe who's online all day is reading that. I'm not sure their audience has time to read shit online. Not to dis it, there may be a market for it, but it may not be online.

Salon?

Their joint is online, but when you have expenditures like a magazine you need magazine revenue. And they don't have it.

[Inside]?[[Inside]was among the first publications to cover UrbanExposé; it was rumored that they at one point offered to buy it.]

That magazine is dope. I have to say, hands down, that's my favorite magazine right now. I may seem like a complete idiot for saying that, and I know mad people who disagree with me, but if there was a magazine of record for people who were media and tech savvy, that would be it. The sad thing is that that's the magazine that could get cats up to speed, to be really really smart, and able to merge media together and make money. Digital music, interactive television, Web content, digital filmmaking on the creation and distribution levels?that magazine is hot. I say that because I've seen people snarf at it, but that magazine is the convergence. I read it and say, "This is for me!"

Will MediaThreat be like [Inside]?

MediaThreat is more like Plastic, but a lot more focused. It falls somewhere where Plastic is too broad and Slashdot is too focused. It's great how Slashdot is focused, and Plastic is a great model, but it's a little too broad for me. MediaThreat is going to be in the middle of those.

And of course you'll do a viral marketing campaign.

In this space, there are a lot of mistakes to learn from. If you watched carefully, in between all those ruined plans, there's a blueprint. Like those big pictures in the desert, a design of old bones you can't see when you're walking by but you see it when you fly over?okay that was wack. Haha, I beg your pardon, kid.