The Spot

The Spot, or thespot.com, was the second episodic online story (1995-1997), after an earlier experiment by AOL's QuantumLink Serial, and pioneered the underwriting of bandwidth and production costs by offering paid advertising banners on the web pages and product placement within the journal entries. The site earned one of the original Webby Awards.

The Spot was likened to "Melrose Place-on-the-Web" and featured a rotating cast of attractive actors playing trendy and hip twenty somethings who rented rooms in a fabled southern California beach house called “The Spot”, in Santa Monica, California. Some of the actors depicted online were also writers and behind-the-scenes production staffers on the site, while some later appeared in independent films or in broadcast television series as on-screen performers.

The characters, called "Spotmates", would keep near-daily online diaries (similar to what later came to be called blogs), respond to emails, and post images of their current activities. In addition the site boasted short videos, as well as photos relating to the diary entries. The fanbase on the site, which called themselves "Spotfans", interacted on a daily basis with the Spotmates and each other, discussing the newsworthy events.

The Spot engaged the audience by allowing them to become part of the storyline and give advice to characters—sometimes succeeding in changing how characters responded to the in-story situations. Viewers were encouraged to post on the message boards (the "Spotboard"), send e-mail to the various characters offering them insight, advice and even arguments to their posted life dilemmas and dramas based on loosely orchestrated story arcs and different character viewpoints of the same storyline. The audience opinion was used by the writers to affect storyline directions, allowing the writing staff a maneuverability not possible in traditional media outlets.

The site was started in June 1995 by Scott Zakarin, who at the time was an aspiring filmmaker from New York who had been directing television commercials for advertising agency Fattal and Collins. He convinced his employer to back the idea of an interactive fiction site, and the result was the most successful interactive fiction site to date. According to Zakarin, at its height the site received over 100,000 hits a day, a tremendous response for its time.

In the spring of 1996, buoyed by intense media interest in the project, Zakarin sold his interest to minority investors, who sought venture capitalist backing to create an online network called American Cybercast, a spin-off from Fattal & Collins. Fattal & Collins asked their Vice President, Sheri Herman to bring in venture capital as The Spot was not being monetized and draining Company resources. In a matter of weeks, Ms. Herman brought in Intel who led additional investors into an initial 7 million dollar round of financing. The new investors wanted a larger number of webisodes created under the umbrella name American Cybercast.

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