It's well past midnight on Sunday evening, but you'd never know it from the active message boards on teen portal Bolt. Runchica writes about the problems she's having with her homecoming dress. Rockerbaby386 wonders where to draw the line on sleeping with friends' exes. And on a paganism bulletin board, noisy_mouse whines about the pentagram.
In the self-contained bubble of teen girl sites, everything appears normal. But don't let that fool you. When it comes to the investors who spend millions to attract teenage girls and fund their musings, uncertainty rules. What once seemed like a killer idea is stiffening into rigor mortis. The news that rocked the teen world most profoundly? The closing of beauty and fashion teen portal Kibu after less than two months. So dim were the company's prospects that it gave back some of its $23 million to investors.
Despite a large number of visitors, nearly every major player is struggling. Whether because of the unwillingness of teen girls to spend money on the Web, a crowded field that also features established players like Seventeen.com and America Online (dossier), or the wrong presentation, the portals may sometimes feel like they're under more pressure than an adolescent. San Francisco-based Snowball, a conglomeration of three affiliate-driven sites - gaming network IGN.com, student site Powerstudents.com and teen-girl portal ChickClick - has endured four rounds of layoffs and watched its staff dwindle from 500 to 250. ChickClick lost its two founders to Kibu. Former Snowball employees say the site no longer has any real marketing budget. Competitor iTurf (TURF) announced losses of nearly $16 million in the first six months of 2000, though it also projected a profit for the fourth quarter. Both Snowball and iTurf have seen their stock price drop to about $1. Meanwhile, other sites are struggling with their model. "Bolt is relying on community, but there's no business model behind it because advertisers realize that community sites are the least likely to get the response advertisers need," says Ekaterina Walsh, an analyst with Forrester Research (FORR). Bolt CEO Dan Pelson did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
If all this feels a little sudden, it's for good reason. Imagine you're an investor in late 1998 or early 1999. Someone approaches you with an idea for a portal aimed at teenage girls - a spend-happy, Backstreet Boys-loving mass you've heard so much about. The site will mix content, community and commerce. Demographic studies suggest that teenage girls love to shop, spend a lot of time online and enjoy reading the kind of editorial found in teen magazines. Being a faithful student of demographic marketing, you plunk down the cash.
But market segmentation is an art, not a science, and the very points that once argued for teen portals' gleaming future have been turned on their heads. Experts now say that not enough teens own credit cards, making it tough to spend the necessary dollars. (A Jupiter report released last month shows that while the number of teens expected to be online by the end of this year, 13 million, is relatively close to the 17 million adults who'll be in cyberspace, teens will spend only about one-fourth of what grown-ups will spend.)
A Web community, it's been discovered, can't replicate the mall, so while teens may visit, they don't necessarily stay - or buy. And on the Web, teens seem to want content that is "genuine" - like articles written by other teens. This is validated by the popularity of teen-run sites like Ashley Power's Goosehead. These factors have proven a heady combination. "All this hard work and big money goes into it, and they still can't make it work. That suggests a fundamental flaw," says entrepreneur Tim Cobb, whose own teen portal, Hipo.com, pulled up its stakes in late 1999.
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