Trendy men's newsletter Thrillist has already shown its penchant for giving the middle finger to all things recession-related, whether it be chartering party planes or throwing '90s-dot-com bubble-theme parties (granted, both of those stunts preceded the Wall Street meltdown by a few months). But the New York-based start-up may be savvier than its big-pimpin' image would have you think.
The latest move from the company is a monthly compendium called Thrillist Invites, which is a listing of stuff you can do for free, if you sign up and RSVP. The first Thrillist Invites list will be for its New York subscribers--you have to already be subscribed to the Thrillist New York newsletter to be ushered into Invites--but versions for other cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, are on the way.
"The concept is that these parties are events that typically, Thrillist readers wouldn't have access to: 100 percent free, open bar, great entertainment," co-founder Ben Lerer told CNET News. The invites will range from restaurant openings and wine tastings to nightclub parties and clothing sample sales.
It's sort of similar to MyOpenBar, a weekly listing of regional establishments that offer free or heavily discounted drinking opportunities, but Lerer said it will have a more exclusive, first-come, first-served focus than the "unlimited Pabst Blue Ribbon" offers that often fill up MyOpenBar's ranks.
Lerer added that launching Thrillist Invites wasn't recession-induced, even though belt-tightening readers may be looking for cheap entertainment, and venues may be looking for people to fill their spaces in a time when they might be booking fewer holiday parties.
"It originally stemmed from the fact that we surveyed our audience earlier this year and asked, 'What do you guys want more of?'" Lerer explained. "Something like 80 (percent) to 90 percent of our audience said they wanted more events coverage."
Earlier this month, Thrillist expanded its Web site to offer more content, putting it further into the niche of "lifestyle publication" rather than "daily newsletter," and Lerer said that with a bigger focus on events, the site may expand further--like into Cobrasnake-ish party photo coverage.
Thrillist will also throw more of its own events, a move that some other food-and-bar culture companies, including the San Francisco-based Yelp, have taken in order to fortify a loyal following and give their users an "insider" status. Plenty of liquor brands advertise on Thrillist already, which Lerer said has made it easy for them to nail down booze sponsors.
And Lerer said Thrillist, which is fully advertising-supported and plans to stay that way, is financially sound. Granted, he didn't start from ground zero: he's the progeny of former AOL executive and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer, and fellow ex-AOLer Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm has taken a big stake in the start-up. Another Pilot Group-backed newsletter brand, DailyCandy, sold to Comcast earlier this year for about $125 million.
"Obviously, we get asked this question 50 times a day," Ben Lerer said when asked about a recession strategy. "We are doing really good...even if things slow down in the advertising community, in the online ad space, and even if we're growing less quickly because of some recession."
Las Vegas: Where pasty geeks stand out even more than they do otherwise.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)In the tech community, Las Vegas has somewhat of a bad rap. Sin City, after all, is home to so many large-scale industry trade shows (case in point: CES) that just mentioning the name is bound to induce a headache, and not in the I-got-plastered-and-lost-all-my-money sense.
The guys at Thrillist, the e-mail newsletter for 20- and 30-something dudes, may have changed that a bit. To celebrate their recent launch of a Vegas-centric newsletter (joining New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and soon Miami), as well as the fact that trendy airline JetBlue is one of their biggest sponsors, founders Ben Lerer and Adam Rich opted to fill up a party plane and let loose 150 New York digital folk into the land of casinos and showgirls. (Disclaimer: It wasn't a "press trip," per se, but I opted to pay for my ticket.)
Clearly, online ad recessions weren't anywhere on the radar--but in opting for heavy sponsorships rather than straight-up paying for everything, Thrillist was likely cutting some costs.
So what went down? Well, when you've got a crowd that includes representatives from Gawker, the Huffington Post, Coolhunting, the Onion, and a dozen dot-com start-ups, some scandal is bound to surface. Here's the G-rated version.
JUICIEST NEWS: Insiders tell us that Bob Pittman, the MTV co-founder and former AOL exec whose Pilot Group investment firm has a big stake in Thrillist, has a fun new project in the works. The media veteran is working on launching his own tequila label, thus putting him in the league of Jimmy Buffett. Guess that means Pilot Group's portfolio brands, which also include DailyCandy, Spongecell, and (to a lesser extent) Buzznet, won't need to hunt for liquor sponsors for their parties much longer.
Upon reaching the Thrillist pool party, Richard Blakeley immediately found some arm candy.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Videoblogging Star magazine columnist and rumored reality-show-star-to-be Julia Allison didn't bring her ubiquitous dog, Lilly, along for the trip. (But Lilly didn't stray too far from New York media-land: the white Shih Tzu was in the care of Fimoculous blogger Rex Sorgatz.)
BEST STYLE: Gawker Media producer and new-media boy-about-town Richard Blakeley showed up for Friday night's parties in a white suit that was one part Tom Wolfe, one part Colonel Sanders, and one part Pillsbury Doughboy. He then jumped into the pool and seemed to be having a blast until management asked him not to swim with clothes on.
It was the second time this year that Blakeley had been unceremoniously dismissed from a Vegas venue. Remember, he's been banned for life from CES.
BEST SPONSORSHIP: Like any good dot-com party, there were plenty of sponsors. But the one people will probably be remembering is over-the-counter mainstay Alka-Seltzer, which provided guests with ample quantities of its new "Wake-Up Call" hangover remedy.
Revelers at Thrillist's 'Information Superparty'
(Credit: Nick McGlynn/RandomNightOut.com)NEW YORK--Predatory women of the Samantha Jones variety would've done well to hightail it to Brooklyn on Wednesday night. Social news site Digg took over the massive Studio B nightclub for an Internet Week New York party and live taping of the Diggnation video podcast, and the place was filled almost exclusively with men under the age of 30. There were more getting turned away at the door. Ladies, I'm sure they could've used some hugs.
It was an event that the Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer described as "two thousand sweaty dudes in a room in (the Brooklyn neighborhood) Williamsburg, paying $6 a beer to watch Digg founder Kevin Rose and sidekick Alex Albrecht perform 'Diggnation' live." There were also a few announcements: sister company Revision3 Networks has picked up the popular video show Epic Fu, and New York is officially Digg's biggest market with over a million visitors a month.
(Side note: Maybe that's why it's so infamously hard to find single men in New York. They're all sitting at their laptops hitting the Digg button on every story about the iPhone they can find.)
At the Digg party, founder Kevin Rose (right) hangs with buddy and wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)Kevin Rose was also completely hounded by fanboys with cameras after the Diggnation taping, something usually reserved for female tech celebrities. He retreated to a back room where he was spotted among digerati buddies like wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk, who was reportedly behind the presence of several bottles of Diggnation-branded wine.
Earlier that night I'd stopped by the Hiro Ballroom nightclub for another Internet Week soiree thrown by newsletter start-up Thrillist, which has the kind of wild-party reputation in New York that Yelp does in San Francisco. There was a '90s-vintage "Information Superparty" theme, which meant that everyone got to bounce around to "Gettin' Jiggy With It" and "Steal My Sunshine" while a VJ mixed visual accompaniments of Lewinsky-era Bill Clinton and Web 1.0 AOL IM conversations. (There's a backstory to the AOL homages: Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer is the son of former AOL exec Ken Lerer, and the start-up is part of the Pilot Group, the investment firm run by ex-AOL president Bob Pittman.)
While it's geared toward the "dude" market that Digg has captured, Thrillist managed to pack its party with a far more mixed-gender crowd. Good show, fellows, good show.
I've got to say that I walked into Monday night's Ideal Bite party in midtown Manhattan with absolutely no idea of what to expect.
I knew that Ideal Bite was a new daily e-mail list that specialized in "light-green living"--you know, a sort of DailyCandy for eco-yuppies. The event, titled "Garden of Hedonism," promised "a night of total titillation that's both decadent and green," and that it would be held at--Johnny Utah's!?
New Yorkers who follow restaurant openings and closings are undoubtedly familiar with Johnny Utah's, an "upscale-cowboy" theme restaurant and bar across the street from Rockefeller Center. It's also home to one of only two mechanical bulls in Manhattan, and apparently, the rationale for holding a vaguely green-related party there is that the bull is solar-powered.
Al Gore would be proud.
Unfortunately, I didn't ride the bull; I had some reconnaissance to do because I still wasn't exactly sure what the event was all about. Ideal Bite, as I soon learned, is the newest offspring of Pilot Group, the on-the-down-low media investment group run by MTV co-founder and former AOL Chief Operating Officer Robert Pittman.
Pilot Group, as some better-informed attendees told me, currently has stakes of varying degrees in locally run e-mail newsletters DailyCandy and Thrillist, as well as music blog Stereogum. I also heard that there's a connection of sorts to elite social-networking site ASmallWorld.
This, of course, means that Ideal Bite is a well-moneyed start-up. As a result, the launch party featured an open bar with organic signature cocktails (like the "Forbidden Apple," consisting of vodka, apple juice, lime juice, apple brandy, sparkling cider, and mint leaves), scantily clad dancers wearing faux fig leaves, and well-stuffed swag bags.
The crowd was very Midtownish, very BlackBerry-friendly, and suspiciously good-looking for a dot-com launch party--thirty-somethings, mostly, the men in suits and the women wearing outfits strategically assembled to bridge the gap between office life and nightlife.
I ran into some of the folks behind Thrillist and DailyCandy--Thrillist co-founder Adam Rich reminded me that his start-up is having its own soiree later this week and asked, "What's with all these parties suddenly happening all the time?" Really, you'd swear it were, you know, Silicon Valley. Except we're cuter here.
Also around: Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan, Flavorpill co-founder Mark Mangan, the team from events start-up SpongeCell--as well as two of the guys who run the Webby Awards, who have been very kind to CNET in the past.
Not spotted: anyone from TreeHugger, which presumably offers a less sassy shade of green than Ideal Bite. (TreeHuggers, correct me if I'm wrong, and you actually were there.)
One male attendee eagerly pointed out a couple of Ideal Bite's female writers. "They're hot!" he whispered to me. "I thought they'd be, like, crunchy!"
Pittman was there, but he was naturally mobbed by guests all night. The person I really wanted to talk to was Jason Rapp, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions at InterActiveCorp, whose company had just made a five-way split earlier that day. Rapp was receiving congratulations aplenty, perhaps for his company's candor in admitting to press and investors that its sprawling scope was a disadvantage.
Rapp was upbeat when I asked him how the outlook was for IAC. "We're doing great! Did you see the stock prices?" True, IAC shares did leap up a bit after Monday's announcement. Before I could grill him any further, someone else snagged him and presumably started asking the same questions.
So, the people were pretty, the conversation was good, and the drinks were free. The only problem, really, was the star attraction: the solar-powered bull. My only real familiarity with mechanical bull-equipped venues was when I was in Los Angeles in July for E3, and attended a party at the Sunset Strip's pseudo-legendary Saddle Ranch Chop House. Let's just say the ferocity of the bull at Johnny Utah's paled in comparison to its West Coast counterpart, which I pointed out to an anonymous observer.
"What, do they want to f***ing break the spinal column of some senior vice president at AOL or something?" He had a point.
New York-based dude-about-town newsletter Thrillist--I've heard its founders describe it as "DailyCandy for guys," though the two are not affiliated--will be expanding further beyond its Gotham roots very soon. Today's edition of the morning read announced that sign-ups are now open for the upcoming Thrillist San Francisco list.
Presumably, it'll be like its existing Gotham and Los Angeles brethren: a mix of restaurant and bar picks with a distinct penchant for high-quality barbecue and stiff cocktails; edgy shopping picks (don't worry, boys, it's O.K. to look dashing); and the latest in the hyperlocal Web, like yesterday's Thrillist New York pick, the Ugly Outfits New York blog.
(Don't live in one of those three cities? There's also a "Thrillist Nation" list for everyone else. The quality's up to par, though the content typically isn't quite as good because the insider-y, "local expert" slant is what makes the New York and Los Angeles editions so readable.)
"This is a big deal for us," the Thrillist e-mail wrote in the announcement that its San Francisco edition is imminent. "We're psyched to get started in a city where the mayor sexes up his underlings, the waters churn with man-eating sharks, and people consume more alcohol per capita than anywhere else in the country (sorry Louisiana and parts of Texas)."
The Bay Area has never sounded so...macho.
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