Black Web takes off
'Digital divide' aside, investors and advertisers have begun to see potential in sites for African-Americans

	The Black World Today: Programmer Lawrence Watson (from left), Web editor Michael Codrington and founder Don Rojas. (Sun photo by Jed Kirschbaum)

D. Anne Browne knows the "digital divide" is real, but she doesn't buy the underlying argument that blacks aren't online.

In fact, she's betting on it. As a Web developer, she caters to a growing African-American audience where, she says, opportunity abounds.

"I know how things about black people get distorted," said Browne, a Randallstown resident who created the site Agoodblackman. com. "Black people are too good at too many things to be lousy at this." Her sentiments are echoed by Internet analysts, developers and Web surfers who say that a U.S. Commerce Department report on the digital divide that was released last summer doesn't tell the whole story.

Scott Mills, chief operating officer of BET.com, a subsidiary of Black Entertainment Television, doesn't talk so much about the digital divide as the "digital opportunity" that a growing black presence represents.

The launch of a revamped NetNoir.com today and BET's latest cyberspace effort, launched two weeks ago with $35 million in backing from heavyweight investors, showcase the promise of the black Web audience to Wall Street and advertisers alike.

Blacks are flocking to the Web in part because the price of computers and Internet access have fallen rapidly. And equally important, analysts say, African-Americans are starting to see themselves routinely reflected on Web sites put up by black churches, fraternities, sororities, dating services, record labels and businesses.

Mills wouldn't release statistics last week about the number of visitors to BET.com, but he said the company had to add server capacity on the site's second day.

BlackPlanet.com, a New York-based Web community launched in September, is a year ahead of its most ambitious projections, said executive director Omar Wasow. "In the first week, we would have 50 people online in a given day," he said. "Now, over 5,000 people are online at some time during the day."

BlackVoices.com, another online community, has been a hot commodity for Web surfers since its early days. Six months after its 1995 launch as part of the Orlando Sentinel newspaper site within America Online, BlackVoices was outdrawing the newspaper itself.

"That was by word of mouth," founder and CEO Barry Cooper said of BlackVoices, which offers services ranging from chat and e-mail to e-commerce.

Much of the debate in the African-American Web community focuses on the Commerce Department's report, titled "Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide." They agree that it was a well-intentioned effort to figure out who has access to all kinds of technology.

But there are mixed feelings about one of the report's conclusions: that Americans should be alarmed by a digital divide that may be widening. While blacks have less access to the Web than whites, developers and analysts say their experience tells them the situation is improving.

According to the Commerce Department, black and Hispanic households were only 40 percent as likely as whites to have Internet access at home. More ominously, the gap between white and black households was 5 percentage points higher in 1998 than in 1997.

"The central problem is that Internet use is increasing so rapidly that any snapshot in time may not be accurate," said Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president for technology and programs at the Freedom Forum, a media think tank in Reston, Va. Powell noted that the Commerce report, though released in July 1999, used information gathered in December 1998. In Web time, six months can be an era.

 

Here's a sampling of black-oriented Web sites, large and small. Black Entertainment Television: www.bet.com   Netnoir: www.netnoir.com   BlackVoices: www.blackvoices.com   EverythingBlack: www.everythingblack.com   BlackPlanet: www.blackplanet.com   The Black World Today:  www.tbwt.com   Afronet: www.afronet.com   Agoodblackman: www.agoodblackman.com   DailyDiva: www.dailydiva.com   Soul of America: www.soulofamerica.com   Flip Da Script: www.flipdascript.com   EthnicStreet: www.ethnicstreet.com   Essence Magazine: www.essence.com

Critics also argue that a lack of home Internet access doesn't mean no Internet access.

Ekaterina Walsh, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., who studies Internet trends, said studies shouldn't count out people who have Internet access at work, school, libraries and community centers. If you count users who log on outside the home, she argued, you'll find a significant black online presence.

Forrester's own count in January shows that 35 percent of black households have someone online, compared with 46 percent for whites, 50 percent for Hispanics and 74 percent for Asians. Overall, roughly 46 percent of households in the United States have someone who uses the Internet. Because blacks are behind other ethnic groups, their potential growth as an online audience is greater, analysts say. According to Walsh, the number of blacks online grew by 52 percent from 1999 to 2000.

While no one in the industry disputes the need for closing the gap, Walsh and other analysts insist that it's not so much an issue of race as a question of income, education, age and attitude toward technology.

On the other side, Marsha Reeves Jews, president of Career Communications Group Inc., thinks race plays a more important role. Jews' Baltimore-based media firm promotes engineering, science and technology to minorities and sponsored, with IBM, last week's Black Family Technology Awareness Week effort to get families connected.

She argues that the concentration of "technology have-nots" among blacks and Hispanics is only partly explained by economics. The most important factor, she says, is that "our educational system is not educating people of color" and failing to introduce them to technology. The commitment needs to be made in resources to wire schools and bring technology into the classroom, she said. B. Keith Fulton, director of technology programs and policy for the National Urban League, noted that blacks have shown themselves eager to adopt other technologies. In fact, he said, "Our folks over-consume technology."

Industry analysts have found that blacks buy cable and satellite-based TV service, cellular telephones and pagers at a rate greater than the general population. And that, Mills and Fulton say, indicates what will soon happen with the Internet. In fact, some argue that the Web is the perfect medium for the black audience.

"Traditional media has not informed the black community well," argues Don Rojas, founder and CEO of The Black World Today, a national, online black newspaper. "They find information on entertainment and the community unavailable in other forms of media -- in terms of the black community and other ethnic communities, the Web is the alternative media."

Browne, who runs Agoodblackman.com in time she can spare from her Web development job with a local television station, said she saw this niche clearly. She developed her year-old Web site to counteract the negative portrayal of African-American men in the mainstream media. While sites for black men exist, she said, few deal with important issues.

"There is nothing [else] like this on the Internet," she declared.

Browne solicits volunteers to help with her site, and others have discovered that audience participation is one of the keys to Internet success.

BlackPlanet's Wasow said one of his site's popular features is a science fiction writing contest giving members a chance to rewrite pivotal moments in black history.

"What distinguishes us is that we have a deep commitment to giving our audience a voice rather than just talking to them," he said.

The increase in black Web surfing has spurred interest from investors and advertisers. The most prominent example was BET, which drew backing from a group that included Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch's giant News Corp.

At BlackVoices, Cooper said he's trying to raise $25 million and bring in four to five new partners in the next 30 to 60 days.

"There is no doubt about it -- the BET.com announcement got a lot of people off the fence. Before then, we were having trouble being heard," he said.

BET's Mills said Web businesses have begun to pay attention to the black audience as well. Nine months ago, he said, there were few Internet advertisements in magazines such as Ebony and Essence. Today, there are far more.

Even so, developers doubt there are enough advertising dollars to sustain all the large Internet portals, planned and existing, for black audiences.

This time next year, "There are not going to be five major players in this space," said Mills.

A major reason is the size of the audience. Of the 34 million blacks in the United States, only 10 million are online, and BET has already been approached by other Web sites about potential mergers, Mills said.

Marcus Thompson, a Web developer for DailyDiva.com, which showcases black fashion and culture, said he looks forward to the consolidation and hopes it will produce a player who can fill one last big niche for blacks and the Web.

"We need a black Yahoo!, the quintessential black American search engine," he said. "Once someone steps up and does that, then we can really, really, really say we've got something."