Teenage Wasteland

while some sites feel that the target audience needs to expand to include women in their 20s - "Why would you want to spend so much to acquire customers and lose them in three years?" asks Snowball CEO Mark Jung - many believe the whole premise is flawed. "These sites aren't specialized enough," says Forrester's Walsh. "Not every 12-year-old likes the Backstreet Boys or scooters."

Still, the sites haven't struggled for eyeballs. Snowball drew more than 7 million unique visitors in May and was the 31st most-trafficked site on the Web, according to Media Metrix (JMXI). ITurf's Nielsen NetRatings (NTRT) in July topped 1 million unique visitors. But to achieve this, the site had to throw everything at the wall - from celebrity gossip to an anonymous crush-finder to an offer to buy leather boots. This may or may not be what teens want, but one thing is for sure: It doesn't work for the bean counters. "The amount of money it takes to build a world-class content site is very different from the money it takes to build a world-class commerce site," Cobb says.

In Snowball's case, all these visitors came with a steep price tag - the company engaged in an aggressive offline campaign that some insiders say went too far. "We spent so much on pens and T-shirts and hats that we had to throw away or give to charity," says one former employee. "We should have put that money away." For his part, Jung says that the time to brand was then.

Curiously, the portal most likely to succeed, New York-based Alloy Online (ALOY), brags about a lack of marketing dollars. Founded four years ago as an offline catalog, Alloy is expected to draw $80 million in revenue this year and projects a profit for next quarter. The portal has continued to land offline opportunities, including a book imprint, and, with 16.6 percent of its company owned by John Malone's Liberty (LDIG) Digital, it is primed for a run in the interactive TV market. "We didn't create a Web site. We created a teen media company around the Web," says Matt Diamond, CEO of Alloy.

Diversifying into other media has been a path sought by many sites. ITurf has similar offline appendages, including a bestselling book from its Gurl.com division in 1998 and a successful apparel catalog called Delia's. Snowball's ChickClick is producing a celeb-oriented radio show that it will stream on its site. Snowball also is trying to make up ground by extracting revenue from its user data through a partnership with Jupiter. "The logical extension of the value-add moves in two directions," Jung says. "If the starting point is pure advertising, the next step is direct response marketing."

Back on Bolt, visitors keep such jargon to a minimum, but there are politics and occasional glimpses of the teenage flair for the dramatic. One girl who calls herself LuckyLindy takes aim at other posters. "[At] sites like Bolt, collective Mensa members rail against capitalism in front of their million dollar computers," she writes. "I can only but laugh before I suffocate from the smoke before a burning Rome that is the west in the early 21st century." She might be exaggerating about the decline of civilization, but when it comes to teen sites, the sound of licking flames may not be far off.

Girls Rule

Wooing teens is hard to do, as these companies have learned.

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