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The Black Internet Gold Rush That Wiped Away $75 Million in 18 Months
It wasn’t just Pets.com and eToys — 20 years ago, a slew of hip-hop and ‘urban’ sites became early casualties of the first dot-com bubble
At the very end, Adam Kidron needed a multimillion-dollar loan just to pay severance to the people he was laying off. Some of his employees at Urban Box Office, the company he had co-founded, had to be taught how to apply for unemployment. They were kids, really; many had never had a real job. “I was a twentysomething high school graduate from the Bronx,” says Steven Samuel. “UBO paid me six figures. It was about our worth, not our formal education.” Kidron even made sure all the content creators retained the rights to anything they did at UBO. But riddled with tech issues and mismanagement, UBO couldn’t realize its egalitarian dream.
It wasn’t alone. Between 1999 and 2001, with the greater dot-com era just beginning to spiral, hip-hop and “urban” websites and startups proliferated, flush with investment cash. Hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, riding high in his Phat Farm/Baby Phat fashion heyday, staked his digital claim with media company RS1, later named 360HipHop. (“The site will utilize a multi-media approach to deliver content, providing the user with the latest in…
