If launching a site like Plastic is a bad idea in this economy, there’s no excuse to launch any other sites any time. 
    Plastic is the most economical site that you’ll probably ever see. We have a staff of four people. It’s built from open-source code. It looks really big and acts really big. But it’s probably cheaper to produce than any other content. 
    This is in keeping with Suck and Feed, which have survived for over five years by being incredibly lean and not wasting their money where others have. Even Suck and Feed have very little in common with content sites – and little in common with other sites, period. 
   By those I mean the sites that are laying off people in droves. We’re barely in the same business as those folks. They go for broke, get rich, and then go broke.
     Part of what explains our longevity, to put it in perspective, is that Automatic Media, between Feed, Suck, Alt.Culture and Plastic, has a collective staff of 25 people. That’s fewer than most dot.coms lay off at once.

     I don’t think I’ve seen that yet. It’s not a bad comparison, although I’m not sure it’s the best one. Maybe AmIGothOrNot is a better one. Or AmIGodOrNot.

      I had never put much stock in straight community sites until Slashdot. But Slashdot has been so much more successful in terms of traffic than many others in the category. Slashdot is definitely one of the most significant content sites to come out of the web.
    We talk about Plastic as a new approach toward news and discussion, and it probably is a new approach that will stick around for some time.

     It’s hard to know what the implications are, but the reality for content companies online always has been that they should keep their budgets under control. 
    The market has been in a hallucinatory haze during the last couple of years, a haze that has worked to convince people to outspend their revenue. 
    It’s an odd occurrence to have so many money-losing companies ending up as industry leaders. That’s an odd thing. But if it is remembered at all, it will be remembered as a curiosity. Most companies actually run themselves as businesses, while the people who were doing many of the dot.coms were not.

     You’ll find the same kind of advertisers on Plastic as you would on media properties like Spin, Wired News, Gamers and Movieline. 
    Finding advertisers and sponsors who want to reach that audience might be tougher now than it was three years ago, but regardless of how tough the climate is now we’re still going to succeed in getting revenue. 
   Take a look at Plastic. It’s made with the minimum possible amount of money. Plastic is three days old but I’ve never seen a new launch get so much action. If you take a look at the threads, you’ll see 10-20 posts there already. 
   Slashdot, in comparison, gets 200-post threads. That’s incredible, especially if you look to past community sites like Electric Minds or the Well. As two weeks, then four weeks, pass and Plastic continues to deliver, we hope to move toward what Slashdot gets, which is flat-out a miracle: 200-post threads in half an hour.