.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE A perfect 10: celebrating 10 years online
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY On December 23, 1997, we wrote our first news story. We wanted to get in a week of practice and testing before we went live. On January 1, 1998, PalmPower Magazine went live and we published our first issue online. This week, we reached a huge milestone: 10 years of continuous publishing online here at ZATZ.
.FEATURE
On December 23, 1997, we wrote our first news story. We wanted to get in a week of practice and testing before we went live. On January 1, 1998, PalmPower Magazine went live and we published our first issue online. This week, we reached a huge milestone: 10 years of continuous publishing online here at ZATZ.
Of course, it wouldn’t be until March of 1999 that we officially became ZATZ Publishing. By that time, we’d launched three magazines: PalmPower, Windows CE Power, and DominoPower. Both PalmPower and Windows CE Power (along with PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition and Pocket PC Life) would eventually become part of Computing Unplugged Magazine and DominoPower has become the undisputed leading online magazine for the Lotus community.
.CALLOUT We saved 287,427 trees. Our saved trees could keep Palm Bay carbon-neutral for almost thirty years!
Rounding out our offerings, OutlookPower has become the go-to magazine for help with email, Microsoft Outlook, and Exchange, Connected Photographer Magazine found a unique niche in helping people get the most out of their cameras, and WebSpherePower is now the pre-eminent news source for IBM Java, WebSphere, and Eclipse IT professionals.
Let me hit you with some mind-blowing numbers:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET 8 magazines
.BULLET 360 authors
.BULLET 2,338 in-depth articles
.BULLET 36,413 news stories
.BULLET 50,381 outbound links to other Web sites
.BULLET 1,102,530 email newsletter subscribers
.BULLET 529,214,400 individual email newsletters mailed
.BULLET 1,866,000,000 Web pages served
.END_LIST
Denise Amrich and I started ZATZ after heading up a number of print magazines for Ziff. One of our earliest debates was whether we should produce our magazines online, in print, or both. Obviously, we finally chose to produce the magazines online. No trees were killed in the production of our content.
.TEASER To learn more about our 10 years online (and what that meant for the environment), tap here.
.H1 How many trees have we saved?
Which brings me to a question I’ve never fully explored: just how many trees did we save? If you combine the 1.8 billion or so Web pages we’ve served with the 529 million email newsletters we’ve sent out, and you conservatively estimate each page or newsletter corresponds to one printed page, we’d have consumed about 2.4 billion pages of paper.
The [[http://www.conservatree.com/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml|Conservatree site]] estimates that one tree will produce 8333.3 sheets of paper. Given this, we can calculate we’d have consumed 287,427 trees. That’s just astounding.
The fact is, we probably saved quite a few more trees beyond the 287,427 number above. Over the years, established print magazines in our markets found it very hard to compete with us. We offer information free, online, and available 24/7. As has been shown over and over the last 10 years, subscribers almost always choose free online resources over paid subscriptions. And, since we’re not paying for all that printing and postage, we can pass that savings on to our advertisers. With a limited advertising budget, many advertisers have chosen our more cost-effective offerings over the much higher costs of advertising in print publications.
Without a doubt, the competitive nature of Internet online publications like ours has had a clear impact on market forces, and those market forces are also helping to save trees. By out-competing those print publications, they’re no longer consuming woodlands and no longer generating toxins as a necessary side-effect of their operations.
If anyone ever argues with you about the green value of the Internet, talk about the vast numbers of trees saved. By contrast with printing, our Internet publishing is completely green. And that’s not counting those terrible pollutants I alluded to in the previous process — these are produced as a by-product of the printing process itself.
Few know that printing is one of the world’s major polluting industries. The printing process releases huge amounts of toxins from oil-based inks and press chemicals into the water and air. Wood pulp paper bleaching produces dioxin, a substance so toxic the government measures it in parts per billion.
Now let’s look at something called organochlorine compounds. These compounds are highly carcinogenic and are suspected to be a primary cause of cancer in women. Paper production, because it dumps organochlorines directly into the water, may well be the biggest offender. Organochlorine exposures are associated with a 4 to 10-fold increase in risk of breast cancer.
.CALLOUT Now it begins to make sense why Al Gore invented the Internet!
But we didn’t kill the trees and we didn’t release the toxins. Instead, those 287,427 trees had the chance to live. A typical tree releases about 180 pounds of oxygen into the air per year. By factoring out how many years the trees would have lived (10% the first year, and so forth), those trees had the chance to release 284,552,730 pounds of oxygen into the air during these 10 years.
With everyone so concerned about global warming and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s also important to realize that each tree absorbs the carbon dioxide equivalent of one ton of coal burned per year. So what’s the bottom line? Our saved trees absorbed the carbon dioxide equivalent of 1,580,849 tons of coal burned.
Just by way of perspective, the typical home in America uses about 907 kilowatt hours per month, according to [[http://www.uu.edu/dept/physics/Science%20Guy%202004/0407Electric%20bill.htm|Union University]]. The typical ton of coal produces the energy equivalent of 6,150 kilowatt hours. A little math shows us that our saved trees would have reabsorbed the carbon dioxide generated from powering 10,719,097 houses for a month.
In other words, our saved trees could make Los Angeles carbon-neutral for almost eight months. Our trees could keep a city of 89,325 families carbon-neutral for a decade. Denise and I live in Palm Bay, Florida, the largest town in Brevard County. With 97,478 residents, 37,491 households, our saved trees could keep Palm Bay carbon-neutral for almost thirty years!
.BEGIN_KEEP
With that, let’s look at another set of mind-blowing numbers:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET 2 founders (Denise Amrich and myself)
.BULLET 1 decision (online instead of print)
.BULLET 287,427 trees saved
.BULLET 1,580,849 tons of coal burning countered by reabsorbing the carbon dioxide
.BULLET 10,719,097 houses carbon-neutral for a month
.BULLET 89,325 houses carbon-neutral for a decade
.BULLET 284,552,730 pounds of oxygen released into the air
.END_LIST
So if anyone ever tells you that one or two people can’t make a difference, just look at those numbers. When Denise and I decided to publish online, we made a simple decision. The net result of that decision, 10 years later, was a tremendous ecological benefit.
Hey, if you want a simple solution to global warming, move all publishing online. Now it begins to make sense why Al Gore invented the Internet!
Whew! We’ve been busy. Of course, back in January of 1998, we didn’t know if we’d make it to June.
.END_KEEP
.H1 Those early days
Those were the early days of the Internet, what we now call "pre-bubble". When we started, nobody knew if you could really make money online (and, for some companies out there, we’re still not sure). We certainly didn’t know if we’d be able to sustain ourselves almost entirely on ad revenues.
.BEGIN_KEEP
You see, we did something different back then. Back in a time when almost everyone was going for the venture money, we decided to fund the company out of our own profits. After almost a year of discussions with venture capitalists large and small, the one big conclusion we came to was that it wasn’t for us. By managing our income and expenses with care, we were able to be profitable from Day One — a business strategy that helped us thrive through the bubble.
In those early talks with VCs is a clue that shows how much the world has changed in the past 10 years. Back then, I’d incorporated into our business plan a small discussion of the green benefits of publishing online, the saving of trees, the absorption of CO2, the reduction in printing toxins, and so forth.
At the time, all the potential investors I met firmly instructed me to remove any environmental discussion from the business plan. I was told a business plan was about business and a discussion of environmental issues was just a side-show for tree-huggers. Now, of course, there are entire VC funds devoted to environmentally conscious companies. My, how times have changed!
As history has proven, we were probably right. So many of the other companies formed during that time became victims of the dot-bomb, while we just puttered along, fueling our business entirely on our own revenues, remaining fiercely independent, saving trees, and providing great reading for all of you.
Not only did we make it to June 1998, we made it 10 years and it’s now January 2008. In August, our next big anniversary will be 10 years of DominoPower. Even our newest magazine, Connected Photographer, has been going strong for more than four years.
.H1 So much has happened over 10 years
When I think back over the last 10 years, I’m struck by just how much has happened, how many stories we’ve told, how many challenges we’ve overcome, how much we’ve learned, how many cool people we’ve met, how many people we’ve helped, and how much fun we’ve had.
To all of you who’ve been reading our magazines for these last 10 years, thank you. It’s been an amazing journey. And we’re not even close to done. Keep reading. We’ll have a lot more for you over the next 10 years.
See you next week!
.BIO
.END_KEEP
