The Wired Media Empire Rises Again

The Web isn’t old enough for nostalgia yet, you may say, but if there were to be an occasion for such feelings, yesterday might have been the day.

Why? The announcement that Conde Nast has at long last reunited the lost siblings of what was once the revolutionary Wired media empire under one roof — the same roof, in fact, where they were born.

In truth, this is the story of a classic business error that finally is being corrected, a full decade after the fact.

It was ten years and a global iteration ago that co-founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe were driven from control of Wired Magazine and Wired Digital by an aggressive alliance between Class C investors and a group of in-house collaborators.

It’s also a rich tale of betrayal and greed, on all sides, but I’ll spare you those juicy details here in favor of the grittier violations of business logic that are at the core of this matter. When Conde Nast stepped in to purchase the magazine in early 1998, the digital properties, including the essential domain, Wired.com, were taken over by Lycos.

Breaking apart the offline and online sides was the classic error, though not uncommon at the time. Under Conde Nast’s ownership, the magazine did fine, but its presence on the web lagged badly behind that of other media companies — an irony not lost on those of us who worked for Wired 1.0 when it launched many of the most influential early websites .

In 2006, Conde Nast rectified one big part of this problem by purchasing Wired.com from Lycos. Wired News, one of three leading brands launched in 1994-1997, had been operating at that URL ever since the early days; subsequently the magazine seems to be reorganizing its sites to give more visibility to the magazine’s content online.

Which brings us to this week’s news. Conde Nast has now acquired the two other strong brands — HotWired and Webmonkey — and reunited them with Wired News under the Wired Digital banner. Now, the company’s execs are talking about leveraging these properties and scaling up growth and all of those other good things that Web-based operators always talk about.

For me, and perhaps others who helped build HotWired, Webmonkey and Wired News, it’s a clear validation of the cross-channel synergy we were in the process of implementing originally.

Too bad it’s happening some ten long years later! We’ll be watching to see whether Wired Digital 2.0 can live up to its name, or whether it will prove to be only a nostalgic born-again better suited for museum display.