Vinit Bharara’s Some Spider Begins to Weave Its Web
Several months ago, Vinit Bharara, founder of the digital media publisher Some Spider, bought the pre-K-oriented website Scary Mommy (“A parenting website for imperfect parents”) as a base for serial niche-site reproduction. The mommy site, which was founded by Jill Smokler, has already nurtured its first-born within the Some Spider umbrella, The Mid, which is being overseen by Smokler. A third arrival – Café, a relaunched site — will debut in the fall, and today fills in some detail on that product.
Most significantly, a year, from now Some Spider intends to employ about 90 people, a third or so of them in technology, up from about 20 today.
What exactly might Some Spider become?
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Think a little bit Vox, with its core Chorus publishing platform, off which it runs topical sites independent of each other. Think a little bit Buzzfeed, with its editorial personality and thrust to get to massive scale. Think a little bit of Vice, with its more personalized reporting of hard news. Think even a little bit of Pierre Omidyar’s First Look, which, too, believed in central core technology and decentralized editorial leadership. Think mostly, though of Quidsi, the site that Bharara sold to Amazon for $540 million in 2010. If we’re talking about Some Spider in 2017, it will probably be because it found new ways to marry e-commerce and editorial content. We hear traditional publishers increasingly again talking about ecommerce as a source of future revenue, but few are making much investment. Some Spider, thus, becomes a test of value more widely.
Today, Some Spider announced that Blake Zeff, former Salon politics editor (and Capital contributor), has formally joined on to re-launch Café.com in the fall. We say formally because Zeff announced he was leaving Salon six weeks ago for a “start-up.” Then, Rajiv Pant, the Times CTO, quit the Times for a ”start-up.” As some observers started connecting the dots, the start-up bread crumbs have led to the door of Some Spider’s Flatiron office, and to Some Spider’s brand new COO and president Paul Smurl. Smurl had been the New York Times’ paywall architect and served as interim digital business amid serial Times exec change in the first part of 2015. What the company may lack in public announcement adroitness, it is making up for in the experience of its early hires.
Those hires, plus some renewed, almost retro ideas on blogs, community and e-commerce will make the seemingly oddly named Some Spider watchable. (It’s parable-esque name drawn from the “Some Pig” rescue scene in E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, a book that’s a favorite of Vinit Bharara’s kids.)
Bharara has self-funded Some Spider so far. We can figure that the enterprise would require $5-10 million in early funding, and Bharara is now out raising it.
Like, Scary Mommy and The Mid, Café.com aims to connect with readers on a visceral level.
Smurl lays out the opportunity he sees:
“On one hand you have traditional publications, the way they cover the parenting space . Take the new Vodaphone maternity leave policy. It is covered in a sterile third-person, rat-a-tat-tat way, and on the other end of the spectrum you have a lot of mommy blogs where you see a lot of almost diary entries. You can imagine there is a middle ground that can make a lot of sense.”
Citing Some Spider mom sites, he adds, “We provide first-person narrative. It’s authentic, relatable. It’s fun, but it’s also useful and informative. That’s a magic combination. It’s that sort of mix that we are looking for. We want to connect in real ways with the audience. We want the content to be of, for and by the people. Everyone who is writing it and contributing to it is a member of that community.”
Smurl and Bharara both come up back repeatedly to these words: Identity. Voice. Engagement.
“We can monetize the relationships,” says Bharara. Think – down the road – membership and clubs.
Bharara and Smurl start with 3 Cs – content, community and e-commerce. That trinity isn’t a 2015 construct. In fact, I recall working whiteboard around that triangle in the late ‘90s. Surely, we thought, smart content companies could engender digital community and connect it useful services and products. Lots of business plans disappeared into black holes.
It’s a dream still unfulfilled, as Some Spider takes a new swing at it. Certainly, 2015-16 isn’t 1998, and the company takes off in a far different landscape. What’s now possible: Quite inexpensive, high quality publishing technology and a social web that does much of the marketing – for free—as long as good, shareable content is produced.
On this score, Some Spider borrows much from Vox, Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, all of which have richly benefited from lower-cost tech and social sharing.
Where it differs, and what offers its major chance to break out among more established competition is Bharara’s e-commerce experience.
Quidsi excels at selling stuff to harried parents, under brands like Diapers.com, Soap.com. BeautyBar.com, Wag.com and YoYo.com. The sites’ “we’re-all-in-this-together” feeling has created a business that employs about a thousand people and which Amazon operates independent of the mothership. Its standing within the company was reinforced this week when Jeff Bezos tapped Maria Renz, Quidsi’s current CEO, to be his new “shadow” strategic advisor.
So what do and will Some Spider’s 3 Cs look like?
In content, both Scary Mommy and The Mid share a conversational, bloggy, break-through-the-BS tone. They’re heavy on listicle (“Six Reasons the Family Medical Leave Act is Bullshit”), confessional and practical.
Both offer a sense of community, both through that content and, its great sharing on Facebook.
The e-commerce will come later – mainly in 2016 and beyond – as Some Spider hopes to grab 10-20 million monthly uniques per site, allowing profitable scale overall and sufficient traction for ecommerce. Bharara says the seven-year-old Scary Mommy is profitable, just on programmatic advertising at this point, given its low costs.
The Mid targets would-be graduates from Scary Mommy. Its target demographic: “Thirty to forty moms, mostly in their 30’s and 40’s with kids who are school age, 6-17.”
Today’s Café.com announcement looks, on the surface, as more of a departure for the company than a logical progression. Bharara launched the site in September and then pulled it back around the first of the year, as he envisioned the bigger company Some Spider is becoming.
It will take on broad issues of broad interest – and must figure out ways to win, and hold, audience against burgeoning competition.
We’ll cover how “Obamacare is it working for you, for you as a member of a group, and within reason, provide interactives,” says Smurl of how Café will differentiate itself. We’ll have voices from around the country. Turning to the issue of police violence, he adds, “Think about a mother in Baltimore and in Ferguson, talking about what’s happening there and how she talks to her teenage son and making sense of it all.”
For his part, Bharara comes back to the visceral.
“I’m a big fan of emotional content. It wins every day.” We’ll have the explainers and all, but we’ll provide more human experience to it, very different than what Upshot and Vox do.”
With a staff of 10-20, Café and Zeff will inevitably have to pick the spots carefully – among overall topics – and then decide how to narrow down coverage to the identity groups it identifies. Many issues, many “identity groups.”
That’s a tall order for a kind of explainer site, going up both against the New York Times’ Upshot, Vox.com and FiveThirtyEight.com, each of which has now established itself and everyone from CNN to AJ+ that have plied similar humanization of the police violence story, for instance.
Consequently, it’s easier to see how Some Spider can translate the early audience success of Scary Mommy – with 11 million monthly uniques — to The Mid than to Café – and apply a niched ecommerce business model to it at some point Yet, all of Some Spider is so new, the company must be given time to figure itself out.
If Bharara’s ecommerce experience – and attention to knowing and controlling content costs by the unit – explain the Some Spider difference, then his comparison of it to the publishing business offers a blindingly simple truth.
“I come at it from an ecommerce view,” he says. “You count contributor costs – fully loaded – and divide it by the number of stories.
“In ecommerce, you are buying products for X and selling for Y. That’s your gross margin.
“This is an equivalent way of thinking about it. You acquire your stories at X and you sell them at Y, and you want to maximize the margin. What I love about this model is that different from ecommerce, here content is almost a fixed cost….As you scale your audience, you get leverage on your fixed costs and it’s better in some ways than classic inventory.”
There, ladies and gentlemen, we have the formulation that too many miss, and the financial rationale that funds Vox, Vice, Buzzfeed and more. The argument puts money down on that old Internet maxim: “Produce once, distribute many.”
