June 26, 2007
Nerve began ten years ago today, in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the East Village, with a small act of deception. The Nerve staff, which then consisted of three people — my girlfriend
Genevieve; my sister's boyfriend,
Joey; and me — staged a faux "button-pushing ceremony"
in our cramped living room to launch the site for the benefit of a credulous
Village Voice reporter. It was a thorough performance, complete with a primal victory dance, ricocheting champagne corks, and the all-important, NASA-style tremulous button depression. The truth was that the site had been live for a day and the button pushed was the last letter of the URL. We had intentionally delayed the launch for a week because we smelled a publicity opportunity — we heard that a federal judge would be overturning
COPA (the Child Online Protection Act, which would have criminalized the publication of Nerve), on June 26, 1997.
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June 26, 2007
Nerve began ten years ago today, in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the East Village, with a small act of deception. The Nerve staff, which then consisted of three people — my girlfriend
Genevieve; my sister's boyfriend,
Joey; and me — staged a faux "button-pushing ceremony"
in our cramped living room to launch the site for the benefit of a credulous
Village Voice reporter. It was a thorough performance, complete with a primal victory dance, ricocheting champagne corks, and the all-important, NASA-style tremulous button depression. The truth was that the site had been live for a day and the button pushed was the last letter of the URL. We had intentionally delayed the launch for a week because we smelled a publicity opportunity — we heard that a federal judge would be overturning
COPA (the Child Online Protection Act, which would have criminalized the publication of Nerve), on June 26, 1997.
Our press pandering worked all too well — early the next morning, after a hard night on the town, I ended up on CNN attempting to describe Nerve's mission through the haze of a crippling hangover. The
Village Voice story came out a few days later, followed by a spate of stories in
Time, New York,
the New York Times, and many other publications. I would like to say that the button-pushing episode was our only moment of dishonesty, but the truth is that the whole early press story was somewhat cultivated. It went like this: Nerdy young couple with glasses (that presumably has sex with some regularity) launches online magazine about sex. This time around the formula is different: it's a magazine about sex and culture that is intended for an audience of both women and men. Much to our families' horror, we posed nude (well, to the extent that one can) for
Newsweek, and later streaked in running shoes and scarves while distributing propaganda for a
60 Minutes segment.
Looking back on it, we were as shameless as they come, driven in part by the exigencies of a non-existent budget, and in part by the normal cocktail of vainglory and triumphalism that besets most young media subjects. But I like to think that we can be forgiven this in light of the colossal hopefulness — some would say naivété — of
the Nerve mission.
We had it backwards. While many of the most successful magazines pretend to be about "lifestyle"
and are actually about sex, Nerve pretended to be about sex and was actually about the human condition. Sex on the outside, art and literature on the inside — a clever inversion that made us scary to advertisers and inadequately graphic to appeal to porn consumers. We combined this ingenious revenue-free formula with an insistence on paying writers — borderline print-magazine rates for the heavyweights — wagering that we could recoup the costs by selling book anthologies. We poured our hearts into longwinded, flattering letters to our favorite writers and photographers, and spent countless hours grooming some extraordinary young talents.
It
worked. Sort of. Adequately. As far as we could tell. The audience grew, we won awards, the internet became hot, the press obsessed, investors lined up, and before we knew it, Nerve was translated weekly into German, French, Spanish and Portuguese, we were making a film with Miramax and a TV show with HBO. It was borderline glamorous, monthly losses notwithstanding.
And then in 2000 the air began to seep out of the internet bubble, or pus out of the contusion, and it became clear that we had to move fast to develop new revenue streams. We tried countless business models — free Nerve email accounts, message boards and e-commerce, but it was
Nerve Personals, and then
Nerve Premium subscriptions, that kept the good ship Nerve afloat. We reached profitability in 2002 and have been growing without investment ever since, most recently launching our second brand,
Babble, in December 2006.
The business adventure is ancient history at this point, but here's what we have to show for it: an archive of about 5,000 original pieces of writing and more than 15,000 photographs, published every day for ten consecutive years. A mother lode of extraordinary work, in our biased opinion. Indeed, the only days in the last decade that we failed to publish new original work, to my knowledge, were three days following 9/11 when police barricades prevented us from reaching the office.
During the next several weeks we will be featuring some of the most interesting, controversial, and beautiful content published on Nerve.com during these last ten years, along with our own Oral History of Nerve — interviews with the various generations of the Nerve staff who made it all possible.
It's been a labor of love for us, and we are just getting started. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope you will stay tuned — much of our best work is yet to come.
— Rufus Griscom
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