Gawker: valleywag, pets.com

The Web at 20: Not Quite Old Enough to Drink, Yet Drives Us to It

Owen Thomas — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:01:14 EDT

Dear important scientist Tim Berners-Lee: Thank you for inventing the World Wide Web 20 years ago. It's really great and stuff! But were you aware of the crimes committed in your name?

Not that we blame Berners-Lee for these things ... okay, okay, we do. The 20 worst things about the World Wide Web:

1. Julia Allison
2. Twitter
3. Jason Calacanis
4. Wikipedia
5. Henry Blodget
6. Dave Winer
7. Blogs
8. Dead newspapers everywhere
9. Congressman Jared Polis
10. Robert Scoble
11. The Pets.com sock puppet, and Michael Ian Black's subsequent career
12. Digg
13. Perez Hilton
14. /b/
15. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's love life
16. Oversharing
17. Mark Zuckerberg
18. Chris Crocker
19. Internet commenters
20. Kevin Rose

We realize they weren't in your original spec, Timbo, but you should have anticipated them. Really.

Now we can blame the Pets.com sock puppet for two burst bubbles

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:40:00 EDT

The last time I saw the the Pets.com sock puppet was during an E-Trade Super Bowl commercial. In it, a chimp rides a horse through a postapocalyptic, postbubble Silicon Valley. At the end of the 30-second spot, a wrecking ball crashes through an office building, and the puppet flies out, landing dusty and ragged at the chimp's feet. The chimp picks up the puppet and a tear rolls down his face, as he mourns a tarnished symbol of '90s exuberance. But watching today's financial news, I'm thinking the chimp should have burned the little sucker. Because then BarNone — a subprime lender, of course — wouldn't have been able to purchase the rights to the puppet for $125,000 and keep its wretched curse alive. "Everybody deserves a second chance," my foot.

Pets.com CEO Julie Wainwright's new business plan: embracing failure

Owen Thomas — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:40:00 EDT

Julie Wainwright is back. The marketing brain behind the Pets.com sock puppet, Wainwright is now touting a me-too Web 2.0 site called SmartNow, which features user-submitted videos and articles from experts, targeted at women like Wainwright. But how many women are there like Wainwright, really?

But as Oprah proves, inspiration sells more ads than sob stories. What is the market for loser-generated content? That's what Wainwright is now testing.

Presenting herself as a heroine to the middle-aged estrogen set strikes me as deeply disingenuous. She may want to present her career as a triumph of girl power, but really, Wainwright's c.v. reads more like an example of the Peter Principle at work. A marketer at Clorox, Wainwright stumbled into the software business in the '90s, and a startup industry desperate for CEOs grabbed onto her. Reel.com, an attempt backed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to compete with Amazon.com in the video business utterly flopped; yet she parlayed her tenure there into a gig as CEO of Pets.com.

That's where the overpromoted marketer really failed. By buying television ads at a time when Internet access was not yet universal, she spent millions of dollars in venture capital on wasteful commercials that promoted the Pets.com sock puppet but didn't drive users to the website. The commercials did, however, fill up the telegenic spokes-CEO's clip file. She now takes credit for barely avoiding bankruptcy by shutting down Pets.com, neatly dodging the question of how it got to such financial straits in the first place.

Also lost in Wainwright's narrative: the two or three startups Wainwright has launched between Pets.com and SmartNow, only given the briefest of mentions in her LinkedIn profile.

With the bubble in social networking still frothy, and advertisers eager to reach women online, Wainwright will no doubt be able to flip her new startup to some buyer like Samir Arora's Glam Media, who will then offload it to an even greater fool. She'll no doubt account for it as a win. But even such a sale will not disguise this fact: Throughout her career, the only thing Wainwright has ever successfully marketed is herself.

The 10 most memorable tech Super Bowl ads

Nicholas Carlson — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 08:00:39 EST

Behold the best tech ad in Super Bowl history: Apple's "1984" ad, which cost $1.6 million to make and run, and only aired nationally once. The following nine ads, while perhaps not as iconic, are all fascinating in how they seek to make the mysteries of tech compelling to the masses.

Apple's "1984" ad
Monster.com from 1999
CareerBuilder.com from 2005
GoDaddy from 2005
Xerox from 1977
E*Trade from 1999
Pets.com from 2000
Computer.com from 2000
SalesGenie.com from 2007
OurBeginnings in 2000

Reminder of past mistakes or harbinger of future doom?

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:12:18 EDT

TIM FAULKNER — A Wall Street Journal article discussing Lala, the online music play with many different strategies (CD exchange, online radio, album downloads, etc...), and its maverick founder Bill Nguyen reveals that the executive keeps the most enduring icon of the dot-com bubble on his desk: the Pets.com sock puppet. Nguyen intends it as a protective talisman to remind him of what can go wrong, but with an expense-laden business (they expect to lose $40 million over the next two years) that requires massive growth of the consumer base to break even, one worries that the business concerns are a little too similar. That the socket puppet talisman is acting more like the tiki that brought the Bradys such bad luck in Hawaii than as a nostalgic motivator.