Voter.com

The bet

Voter.com launched in November 1999. Justin Dangel, who had worked in the Senate offices of Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, was its chief executive. He wanted it to be the definitive nonpartisan destination for political news and civic engagement, a place where citizens could follow the campaign, learn the issues and act. To show how serious he was, Dangel hired Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, as editor and executive vice president.

The plan was dot-com logic applied to democracy. Build the best political site on the web, gather a huge audience around the 2000 election, and the business would follow the traffic.

Peak

For a moment, it did exactly that. The company said Forbes and Business Week named it the nation's top political website. Bernstein gave it editorial weight, and the site drew a large national audience through the 2000 presidential race.

It was the marquee civic property of its era. Serious political content could pull a crowd online, and for a while Voter.com looked like the future of how Americans would follow their democracy.

What worked

Voter.com published credible, nonpartisan political journalism when that was still new online, and it earned the field's top recognition for it. The audience it drew showed that the public wanted serious civic information. Its ambition, a single trustworthy civic destination, is one the field has chased ever since. As a first attempt, it aimed high and briefly hit the mark.

What failed — the mechanism

Two flaws met in the crash. The first was the standard dot-com condition. Voter.com was an ad-supported content site with no durable revenue, and it spent far faster than it earned.

The second was the calendar, in Agora's reading: the whole premise was tied to the election. Reports at the time gave other reasons too. CEO Justin Dangel blamed financial markets, Washington Technology said election-day traffic could not match MSNBC and CNN.com, and an analyst, Karen Jagoda, said online political portals have no built-in constituency. Political attention surged in the autumn of 2000 and drained away the moment the race was over, and the traffic went with it. That left a company sized for a crowd that gathers only once every four years.

When the bubble burst and the funding disappeared in 2001, the business made no money and its audience had gone home. It closed in February 2001, after laying off nearly a third of its staff and failing to win another round of venture funding. No competitor beat Voter.com. It was built for a season, and the season ended.

What Agora takes from it

Voter.com's audience showed up for the campaign and left when it was over. People still had opinions afterward. They had no reason to engage and nowhere to take them.

That long stretch between elections is where Agora works, which makes the oldest case in the record, on one point, the most precisely aimed at what Agora is. Agora's core design has verified officials posting the substance of the work they are doing right now. It is meant to give participation a reason to exist in the off-season that killed Voter.com.

Agora also doesn't run on advertising. Voter.com's revenue followed its traffic, and its traffic followed the election. A civic platform can't leave its funding to the traffic.