Jim Spanfeller ’79 was right. In January 2001 Spanfeller told the news Web site, The Industry Standard, that Internet businesses were suffering from too much pessimism. The hangover from the dot-com crash would be washed away by reinvigorated Web revenue, he said.
Spanfeller was then in his first days as president and CEO of Forbes.com, a sister product to Forbes magazine. Despite investing millions, Forbes.com was in 2001 losing money and pulling in too few unique visitors to boost advertising revenue. By early 2008, things had changed. The Web site had gone from 500,000 to 22 million unique users per month and ad revenue had grown 50 to 60 percent each year, said Spanfeller during a January visit to Union College. The site employed 120 in 2001 and employs about 300 today.
So, what worked for Forbes.com?
“You can take brands and iterate them into different mediums. Hopefully, we have proved that. But if you take a brand into a different medium, you really can’t be slavish to what previously made the brand work. What people look for on the Web is different from what they are looking for in a magazine,” Spanfeller said. “I think that is a huge mistake that people make and continue to make. The Web is not a medium. It’s like electricity, it’s an enabler.”
Spanfeller joined Forbes.com after a stint as head of the consumer magazine division for Ziff Davis Media. Prior to that Spanfeller held an executive post overseeing Yahoo! Internet Life, Family PC and Expedia magazines. In his current role, Spanfeller oversees reporters, editors and Web support staff who help publish about 3,500 stories a day, manage video news content and offer a host of online tools.
And Spanfeller expects that if Forbes.com remains a popular Web destination, ad revenue will expand.
“It is going to grow. Time spent online is growing rapidly. Dollars spent on online advertising is way underweighted. The standard investment house analysis says that those numbers will come together,” Spanfeller said.
There may be more good reasons to trust Spanfeller’s insight. In a 1997 Union College magazine profile, Spanfeller said of the Internet, “We are still in the embryonic stages of growth.” The impact of what was then called the World Wide Web would be greater than television, he predicted.
Soon after Spanfeller left Union in 1979, he joined the Soho Weekly News as a reporter. His goal was to write a great American novel in the same vein as one-time newspaper reporter Ernest Hemmingway. The novel remains unwritten; but maybe there is a story to be pulled from Spanfeller’s career track, which also includes a stint as publisher of the former Newsweek On Campus, a senior manager at Playboy, publisher of Inc. magazine from 1993 to 1996, and later an executive slot at Yahoo! Internet Life, a magazine about compelling Web sites. The magazine had a paid subscription of 1.1 million but shut down in July 2002 as ad revenue declined and online publications grew in popularity.
Spanfeller, 51, lives in New York City’s West Side with his wife, Margaret (DiMarco) Spanfeller ’79. Spanfeller travelled to campus in January to give students career advice during a panel discussion with College Trustee Mark Walsh ’76, CEO of Genius Rocket, and Peter Handy ’79, general partner of Star Media Group.
As for the lasting impact of his time at Union, he said: “That’s easy. The people I met. My best friends in life came from my time at Union. It speaks to the community that Union is and continues to be."