Multimedia E-mail Publishing: Mercury Mail

In my column last week, I expressed doubts that the HTML-enabled mail client, known as Messenger, in Netscape's Communicator Suite was truly appealing. Who wants to read, let alone create, HTML e-mail, I thought.

Last week at Spring Internet World, I was convinced to change my opinion by John Funk, Founder and Chairman of Mercury Mail, an e-mail pubishing company that sends out nearly two million free personalized e-mail news reports daily.

I've enjoyed Mercury's news bulletin, NEWSpot, in plain text e-mail format. Funk showed me the benefits to the reader and the publisher for putting it in HTML. The simple Web trick of linking items in a table of contents to anchors in the sections below made it easy to selectively view those things that interested me without needing to scroll through the entire message. Other mark-up formatting features like headers, colors, bold-face type, indentations, lists, and tables made scanning the message faster and more efficient.

Viewing two versions of the same message, side by side, I had to admit that the HTML message was far better than the plain text version. When I suggested that an e-mail attachment might be just as effective, Funk said most people wouldn't bother with the extra step of opening an attachment in a browser. I confessed that I probably wouldn't either. Convenience has power.

Mercury mail messages consist of short abstracts of wire service stories from Reuters, PR Newswire, The Weather Channel, and other major news organizations and services. These are prepared by Mercury's editorial staff. The abstracts are linked to online copies of the stories themselves. Mercury's HTML mail can also contain small graphics or photographs. More importantly for Mercury, they contain advertising graphics and links to the advertisers' Web pages.

Mercury's products include:

• NEWSpot--headline news on subscriber-specified topics
• Closing Bell--prices of stocks and funds in your personal portfolio and related news
• Sports Wrap--box scores, news, and information on your chosen teams and sports
• WeatherVane--weather and forecasts of any city
• SnowBytes--snow conditions and the world of winter outdoor recreation
• SpotLite--lottery, horoscopes, TV, movies, and more
• ConsoliDate--calendar reminders for business and personal occasions.

Funk asserts, "1997 will be the year that e-mail goes from being a person-to-person medium to an information store, a genuine publishing medium." With all the fuss being made about push clients like BackWeb and Pointcast, people overlook the fact that e-mail was the original push medium.

Forrester Research estimates that there are 30 to 40 million e-mail users in the U.S.; Morgan Stanley recently estimated that there are 50 million worldwide. Compare this to the relatively small number of people who have any one of the new push clients and you begin to see why plain old e-mail is a natural business choice. Microsoft's e-mail client Express and Qualcomm's Eudora Pro will both be able to view HTML mail messages in their forthcoming versions. Mercury will be able to capitalize on this massive installed base of multimedia clients without ever having to create or market a client of its own. Is John Funk that smart, or is everyone else that stupid?

Mercury's 400,000 subscribers give the publisher detailed information about their interests as well as the usual demographic information. The user profiles are used to generate highly individualized messages and to target advertising.

Most subscribers get more than one of Mercury's publications every day, and some products are offered in multiple editions. In total, there are two million messages sent each day. An Oracle database runs the list of subscribers against the daily editorial output of about 1,000 unique abstracts to generate a massive geyser of e-mail erupting from Mercury's Denver, CO headquarters. Funk explained to me that he chose to locate the company in Denver in part because the city sits astride one of the country's largest transcontinental data pipes.

Mercury's advertisers pay a $40 to $60 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), depending on the degree of ad targeting. My back-of-an-envelope calculation showed that with an average CPM of $50 and two million messages sent daily, the daily revenue potential of Mercury Mail is $100,000. This works out to about $36 million per year. Since they have only 60 employees, that's $600K a year per employee--about six times what an average business expects to make!

Founded in 1995, they've barely scratched the surface of their potential audience. No wonder their investors include SOFTBANK, the world's largest publisher of computer-related books and magazines and the owner of Ziff-Davis.

Past installments of Multimedia Web