Starving to Death on $200 Million [Hardcover]

James Ledbetter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 2003

The Industry Standard sought to chronicle the world of Internet business, but instead became one of its spectacular failures-and its collapse turned out to be a funnier story than you'd expect. . It was not that long ago that The Industry Standard was an international publishing phenomenon. Founded in 1998 with the grandiose goal of being "the Business Week of the Internet economy," it soared to unprecedented heights during the dot-com boom, with far-flung bureaus, a thriving conference business, and a seemingly endless supply of cash. In 2000 alone, The Standard published more than 7,000 ad pages, generating revenues of over $200 million-more than any other magazine in the history of America. Little did anyone imagine that the following August the entire organization would file for bankruptcy. Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year is James Ledbetter's mock-heroic chronicle of the magazine that lived large and died young: the wild dreams, the sudden success, the wanton excesses, the fatal hemorrhage. From his vantage point as one of The Standard's top editors, he saw up close how it succumbed to the same gold-rush fever as the Internet businesses it was supposed to be chronicling, realizing too late that he had been infected as well. As America continues to reckon with its post-nineties hangover, Ledbetter offers a sardonic look at a thriving business that died on the verge of taking on the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Industry Standard began publishing in April 1998 and grew explosively. Judged on its second-year revenue, ad sales and influence, it was one of the most successful magazine launches ever. It took in $300 million in its first 20 months, but didn't survive the next 20 months. Ledbetter, the magazine's European bureau chief, explains how it all happened in a terrific inside account of the Internet boom. The Standard was positioned exactly at the intersection of technology, media business and finance. It was the authoritative source for industry reporting; its stories could drive the Internet stock market; and it was a start-up new-media company with all the innovation and chaos the term implies. Ledbetter is the perfect person to tell the story: an experienced business media reporter who learned about technology and finance on the job; he had a position high enough to see the corporate machinations firsthand, yet had no day-to-day involvement, since he was thousands of miles away from San Francisco headquarters, busy trying to get good stories on a deadline. This mix of corporate history and memoir captures the story's economic and human sides, although at times it's hard for readers to keep track of the characters and events. Despite having a limited initial audience-how many people really want to read about a magazine that croaked not long after its second birthday?-it serves as a fantastic testament to a bygone era.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

In the year 2000, the Industry Standard—the would-be bible of the New Economy—appeared to be one of the most successful magazines in history, with more than seven thousand ad pages and projected revenues of two hundred million dollars. The next year, it went out of business. This self-lacerating postmortem by the magazine's former European editor shows that the Standard was doomed by early success. Unbridled optimism led to wild spending, dubious side projects, and an unwillingness to make hard decisions. The Standard, then, was just like the dot-coms it wrote about, and so the story of the magazine's failure becomes a parable about the era of the bubble. Ledbetter's account of the backroom negotiations that attended the Standard's demise drags in places, but he is adept at capturing both the late-nineties atmosphere of irrational exuberance and the bitter, hung-over feeling that followed.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1st edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586481290
• ISBN-13: 978-1586481292
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,285,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Nostalgic Obituary, February 10, 2003

By 

Jase Wells (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Starving to Death on $200 Million (Hardcover)

The tale of the rise and fall of The Industry Standard is an entertaining read, especially if you know somebody affected by the dotcom bubble burst, if you were laid off yourself, or especially if you were an employee of the company in question. I just happen to fit all three categories.

The Standard was of course an editorial operation, and this book focuses on the experiences of the editorial staff of which the author was a member. Since I was a part of the technical infrastructure team, I wasn't privy to many of the intricate details. Ledbetter's insights into the editorial staff's point-of-view are interesting and amusing; the basic happenings are all there (extravagant offsite meetings, reckless overspending, internal power struggles, and so on), but with some added first-person (or second-person) details.

I was hesitant to buy (and read) this book at first. Would I want to relive the days of The Standard? Would there be anything in there I didn't already know? Would it be interesting? For the most part, sure. It's not entirely a rehash of the life and death of one company; there are sprinklings of humorous (and Dilbert-ish) anecdotes that should be appealing to anybody who has dealt with the pressures of startups and shutdowns.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Those were the days, January 13, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Starving to Death on $200 Million (Hardcover)

I recommend this book highly. While it stands on its own, it will be especially powerful for those of you -- like me -- who were participants in the tumultuous time that Ledbetter chronicles.

While I faithfully read the Industry Standard during its era, I never stopped to think about it as a business. It was clearly successful, and I had thought of it as a lucky benefactor, a byproduct of a real revolution. But what Ledbetter instead shows you is a business that had frankly more real success than almost all the startups it reported on -- the Healtheons, WebMd, Epinions, etc of the era were lucky to do a few million in revenue, and yet in the span of 18 months this magazine went from nothing to over $200 million in revenues, was profitable, had 450 employees, and was actually the highest earning magazine in America. It was almost the opposite of the dotcoms which had millions of readers/users but no revenue -- The Standard has millions of revenue on just a couple hundred thousand readers.

How do you create not just the most successful new magazine in history but actually become the number one earner -- equivalent to winning Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same year -- and then screw it up so badly and get unlucky enough that the business is dead 12 months later? Read this book to find out!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A thoroughly compelling story, July 27, 2003

By 

J. Simon (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Starving to Death on $200 Million (Hardcover)

Nowadays, saying a book read more like fiction than non-fiction is a common thing to say about a book, but I have to say the way Ledbetter captures your attention and keeps you flipping pages is astonishing me because I don't read that many non-fiction books. I breezed thorough the first half in what seemed like only a few minutes, and the ending left me wanting to know more about "The Standard" as he refers to it in the book.

It's not uncommon for me to read a good mystery or thriller in 1 or 2 sittings, but I've never had any desire to keep reading a non-fiction book(even a good non-fiction book) for an extended period of time, and in a funny way the epilogue did seem more like the end of a mystery, filling us in on what's happened to the characters since the Standard folded. I read the book (cover to cover) in a couple of hours. I've never read anything by James Ledbetter before, but I've got to figure he's a pretty good reporter, because he managed to capture my attention, and hold it till he was done with me, and in the end I wanted a lot more. Or course, it's possible I simply had nothing better to do.

It's not a 5 star book. It's not going to change my life, and I won't pass this around to all my friends saying "You must read this book!" But as someone who had never heard of the Industry Standard till I opened the book, I came away from it saying, "I want to know more..."

Also, from my point of view, the book was not about the magazine. It was about Ledbetter's journey through the magazine, often shifting from the magazine's rise and fall to humorous stories about his run ins with PR agents, details about stories they published, and tales of a party or event, that he may or may not have attended.

If you do have a chance to pick up this book, you might enjoy the result, not because of the lessons learned, but because the story is just too good to be fiction.