@LARGE
School's out

By Scott Kirsner, 6/5/2000

Freshman year is over for Boston's college-oriented Web sites, and it's time for some grades. Which ones will still be around for graduation in another three years, and which ones will have dropped out and taken a job making chalupas at the Bell?

College students are as attractive to Web entrepreneurs as they are to Budweiser and Abercrombie & Fitch. ''Students spend over $100 billion a year, and they're arguably the most important demographic in the new economy,'' says Ray Sozzi, founder and CEO of Student Advantage. ''They're first-time heads of households, they're very early in the consumer life-cycle, and they're the first to engage with new technologies.''

But they're also incredibly difficult to connect with. Big-name schools move slowly, and they're reluctant to ink deals with Web start-ups for fear of tarnishing their brands. Students steer clear of Web sites targeted at them, and instead gravitate toward the same mainstream sites everyone else uses.

''There will absolutely be consolidation and a shakeout [in the college Web market],'' predicts edu.com founder Adam Kanner, who not surprisingly insists he won't be one of those shaken. ''We see several businesses a week, looking to be acquired. The marketplace is definitely going to be cleaning out.''

My grades are below. An A indicates a company that will likely still be around, and be profitable, in three more years. An F means that you're not apt to see them back on campus this fall.

Youthstream Media

Youthstream has been in the process of reinventing - and renaming - itself for more than a year now. That's taken a toll on the company's brand recognition, and caused a significant number of employees to bail. The sign above the company's Memorial Drive offices still says CommonPlaces, the name of a defunct Youthstream site, and the company's flagship MyBytes.com domain (formerly known as CollegeBytes) will soon disappear, to be replaced by Sixdegrees.com, a recent acquisition. Still following me?

Youthstream president Ben Bassi tells a convincing story about how Youthstream, with $40 million in the bank, has enough money to endure. He says some of the company's ancillary businesses are already profitable, and can feed students into Youthstream's Web sites.

But then he explains that he's breaking the company into two parts: a business-to-consumer side, which will be known as Sixdegrees.com, and - ready for this? - a division called CommonPlaces that will provide community tools such as chat and home-page publishing to affinity Web sites.

Youthstream's competitors are skeptical, as am I: If the community tools weren't able to turn MyBytes.com into a killer college hub, will customers really come running to buy them? Grade: C-.

edu.com

edu.com offers such blue-chip partners as Apple, Microsoft, and AT&T the chance to market their products to an audience of currently enrolled college students. But verifying that its customers were actually college students created some headaches for edu.

In many cases, edu had to phone up the registrar's office, and Microsoft actually required that students fax in a copy of their school ID before they bought a discounted copy of Excel.

CEO Adam Kanner says he's working out the kinks, and that the site will be easier to use - and easier to run - by the time the new school year starts.

Kanner won't reveal how many students edu has already signed up, but I think it's got a promising future in helping marketers plug in to the college audience. Grade: B.

Mascot Network

Mascot offers an intranet product to help colleges communicate with students. School sites offer everything from facebooks to sports scores to event calendars. Cofounder Jaja Jackson says Mascot has already signed up 30 schools, and he expects to have 100 to 150 by the end of the year.

But Mascot has had trouble landing the prestigious, big-name schools; right now, its flagship customer is Providence College.

Jackson will be raising another $20 million to $25 million this summer to keep Mascot moving forward. His biggest challenge will be getting the product out to enough schools quickly, so that Mascot isn't overshadowed by rivals like Campus Pipeline and Jenzabar.

''You need to establish critical mass,'' says Sozzi of Student Advantage, ''because the turnover is so dramatic. You lose 20 to 25 percent of your constituency every year.'' Mascot's Grade: C.

Student.com

Student.com seems to be in the worst possible position. It's a fairly generic Web site for college students, covering topics like sex, summer jobs, and cool vacations. It has low traffic and name recognition. And it's reportedly always on the verge of running out of cash.

Chief executive Rick Berenson last raised money in September, and this summer he's hitting the streets to scare up $15 million to $20 million more. ''A lot of [college sites] have hit the rocks, and people are looking for the media models that are going to survive,'' Berenson says. Student.com is going to have to fight the odds to be one of them. Grade: D.

ClubTools.com

ClubTools.com founder Paul Ognibene has one thing on his side: a bottomless reserve of optimism. He's unusually sunny, even for an Internet entrepreneur. ClubTools.com provides Web-based management tools for people who run clubs at colleges, and also helps them purchase logo merchandise.

Ognibene brought ClubTools to the new I-Group Hotbank NE incubator in January, and now he's getting ready to raise a $10 million round of venture capital. He'll move out of the incubator in August, and those two events will be the true test of whether ClubTools can fly on its own.

The crux of the business model is taking a slice of the revenue from club-oriented transactions, such as buying T-shirts with the club logo on them, and that sounds a bit shaky to me. Grade: B-.

Experience.com:

Experience.com aims to provide information for students finishing college and looking for their first job. But there aren't as many job listings as you'd find on a really robust career site like Monster.com, and the information about employers isn't as rich as you'd find in other places, like TheVault.com.

Despite that, Experience could be an acquisition target for a larger company seeking to target the post-college set, like Student Advantage, which has already made a small investment in Experience. Grade: C-.

Student Advantage

Ognibene of ClubTools describes Student Advantage as the Death Star. He means that in a good way. ''Everybody knows them. They're the Yahoo of the [college] portals ... an industry leader.'' Ray Sozzi started Student Advantage as a membership program that gave college students discounts at pizza joints and dry cleaning establishments on campus; lately, he's been buying, building, and investing in college Web sites.

After going public last year, Student Advantage's stock has languished. ''The market is waiting for the dust to clear,'' Sozzi says. ''There's so much noise within the higher education space.''

Student Advantage has already established itself as a leader, with sites devoted to college sports, student-written news, and research projects, but Sozzi's focus is on getting students to spend more money. He'll also expand Student Advantage so that it's relevant to high schoolers and college grads. Grade: A-.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston writer and a contributing editor at Wired, Fast Company, and Boston Magazine.