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Our primary long-term focus is building a loyal mass "community" for TBWT, with the aim of quickly becoming the dominant Internet publisher in the black niche market. Black readership on the Internet is growing rapidly, and is estimated at five million in the United States and another one million in the black communities of Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.
Consistent growth of this black market will also undoubtedly be accelerated by Sony/Microsoft's aggressive marketing of Web-TV, and by the overall trend of declining prices in the PC industry. The market for these inexpensive technologies is estimated at 14 million middle and lower-income households by 2000. There is also the rapidly growing global market of Internet users, currently around 120 million, some portion of which is interested in reliable information on the international black experience.
We are in the process of expanding our relationships with major African-American organizations, including the Urban League and the NAACP, as well as African-American mega-churches and African-American magazines, newspapers and radio stations. In addition to providing free email and web site services to all readers, we will seek to partner with black businesses, churches and non-profit organizations in offering their clients, customers and members the same free email and web site service.
At the current stage of development the company has established a well-known hub site and is actively developing a suite of Internet consulting services that revolve around the site. There is nothing else on the Web with a black orientation that matches the depth and breadth of TBWT’s content. We publish news and views covering the global black experience on a daily basis. TBWT contains many of the standard components of an electronic magazine, with one fundamental difference---it is not an Internet appendix of an existing print publication, so much of its content cannot be found anywhere else, on or offline.
The professionalism and experience of our world-class team of editors, writers, columnists and correspondents is unmatched in black publishing. Our self-imposed mandate is not to merely provide quality and credible information for its own sake, but to use our professional skills to enlighten and inspire a healthy understanding and respect for the global realities of different cultures and nationalities.
In 1996 the Gross National Income of African Americans was estimated at $400 billion. Recent studies indicate that, along with women, the African American segment of the US Internet market is the fastest growing of the niche segments. Moreover, black families with incomes of $60,000 and up are purchasing computers at higher rates than their white counterparts.
TBWT readers are mostly professionals, students, academics and entrepreneurs. All earn above-average incomes and are very opinionated. Letters to the editors and responses to our regular reader surveys reflect overwhelming approval of the company's efforts.
To TBWT, the disparities between blacks and whites in Internet usage that was recently documented by a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University—showing a wide gap between blacks and whites on Internet access and use, especially in under $40,000/yr category—represents a huge untapped market on the Internet and thus a great opportunity in all the areas of our business operations. There will be large amounts of private and public money spent in 1999 and 2000 to address this problem, and to provide Internet access to schools in urban and rural areas.
The global Internet market holds enormous growth potential, and The Black World Today, with its international focus, is capitalizing on that potential. TBWT already reaches blacks in countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as in black communities in Europe and Canada. To consolidate our position as a global business, we plan an aggressive marketing outreach to those areas in the coming months and is preparing to publish TBWT content in Spanish, French and Portuguese by the end of 1999.
A recent New York Times article headlined, "Racial Divide Found on Information Highway", says that at a time when Internet traffic is doubling every 100 days, "it appears that, for the moment at least, the majority of blacks are being left behind." Citing a survey by Nielsen Media Research, the article says that less than 6 percent of Internet users in the USA are black although African Americans account for 12 percent of the population.
"Income isn’t the only impediment; there’s something else going on," said Larry Irving, the assistant secretary of Commerce who oversees a $20 million project that finances technology demonstration projects in poor communities. "There is more content by, for and about the African American community on the Net than there is in probably any other medium, but I don’t think that’s known."
One problem, Mr. Irving said, is that schools and communities with high minority populations are much less likely than predominantly white districts to provide Internet access.
"We risk a further widening of the gap between the haves and the have-nots," said B. Keith Fulton, director of technology programs and policy for the National Urban League. As we move into the information age, you need more than reading, writing and arithmetic to participate in our society. You need information literacy, and if African Americans don’t have it, that’s a serious problem."
But E. David Ellington, a founder of NetNoir, a leading Web site about black culture, predicted that the inequalities would be ironed out in time. "The vast majority of white people aren’t online yet either," says Ellington. "I’m not panicking that black folks are a little bit slower and haven’t found this to be as relevant in their lives yet. I know from my own experience that black people are getting online in droves."
Both Ellington and TBWT’s CEO Don Rojas cite evidence that lower-income blacks are now beginning to find their way onto the Net. Computer prices are dropping, and nearly twice as many blacks as whites said they planned to purchase a home computer in the next six months.
Reprint of an article that appeared in BRANDWEEK magazine, November 17, 1997
Black Surfing
By David Kiley
A vastly under-recognized and under-targeted audience for online services is the growing population of middle-class and upscale African Americans.
Blacks per capita last year spent twice as much as white consumers for online services. From 1993 to 1995, the amount that black households spent on computer hardware and software doubled every year, according to Target Market News.
As African Americans increasingly turn to Web sites that address black culture in the way network and cable TV programming seldom does, greater information about the demographics of this audience and its spending habit is being gathered.
At The Black World Today (www.tbwt.com) free Web site, for example, which averages 600,000 hits a week, the site’s owner does not allow anyone to register unless they give up personal data: salary range, age and a host of other personal and financial information. In this way, it is easier for a Web site owner to learn the details about who visits the site than it is for magazine publishers to learn about who turns their pages.
Who is targeting the black virtual community? Virtually no one. The Black World Today is an electronic publication and community, a virtual daily newspaper of the global "black experience." It could be though as the black USA Today on the Net. The publication monitors, politics, culture, sports and business reports about the history of certain black communities in the U.S. and around the world. It also had an online African American history course, which, with just 200 "seats," sold out immediately after it was posted.
Who are the devoted followers of TBWT? "Groupies" is not the appropriate word, but the word does convey their level of enthusiasm. What the site has discovered about its audience has been corroborated by other "black" Web site owners; that they are primarily professionals, writers, librarians, educators and social activists. The site draws members from 68 countries, and a majority of them have annual incomes of $55,000 and higher. Other "black" Web sites include urban Sports Network, Net Noir, Afronet and Café Los Negroes.
Experts say several factors have led to more blacks surfing the Internet. For one, the personal income of blacks has risen steadily, resulting in an increase in the ranks of middle and upper-income black households.
A recently released report from a study done by Target Market News, "The Buying Power of Black Americans," supports the findings of Black World Today about the economic power of blacks online. The study found that not only are black households spending more than their white counterparts on new cars, clothing and other key items, they are spending more on online services-two and a half times more. African Americans provided 25% of the subscription revenues to America Online and Compuserve last year.
Expenditures for online services by black homes totaled $10 million this past year, while expenditures on hardware and software totaled $741 million.
Do the numbers tell the whole story? No, says TBWT owner Don Rojas. Despite the rising number of black Net surfers, even multi-cultural and black ad agencies are not jumping on. "I think it is a combination of overall reticence about advertising on the Web, and the fact that many advertisers are not seriously targeting the black community," said Rojas, who is former executive editor of The Amsterdam News and former director of communications for the NAACP.
Rojas also notes that there is still a lot of room for growth. "The upscale black segment of the community is moving fast buying computers, getting online and buying software. But a significant part of the community is not online. Lower income blacks and the working class just don’t have the purchasing power," Rojas said. That said, there are numerous grass-roots programs cropping up around the country designed to get young African American children, especially those of low-income families behind a computer screen, even if it is in a "lab" environment. The city of Baltimore, for example, has installed computers in public housing projects.
With a big push on by computer companies in the under- $1,000 computer segment, though, purchasing power does not have to be as high as it used to be for blacks, or any other group.
