The Scoop...

A marketer's dream

Targeting the millions of teens worldwide (not to mention their wallets), Bolt.com has a lofty goal: to become the No. 1 global teen brand. The company has been well on its way to achieving that goal since Dan Pelson founded Bolt in 1997 as part of Concrete Media; today, the independent Bolt boasts more than 1.5 million registered members, mostly between the ages of 13 and 21. Site features include a daily horoscope, free e-mail, chat rooms, message boards, and a Bolt store that sells merchandise from partners such as Mooks and Dollhouse. Bolt's potent combination of chat and commerce made the company's teen dreams come true when it filed for a $46 million IPO in December 1999.

Teen-authored content

To many teens, Bolt's appeal lies in its authenticity - more than 95 percent of material on the site is written by their peers, not Bolt employees. The site's channels include Movies, Muxic, Sports, Advice, Cars, and Sex and Dating. Users can also communicate via message boards and chat options. Bolt members have access to free email and voicemail as well as proprietary tools such as Bolt Notes, a short messaging system, and Tagbboks, a "member-created" polling system.

Advertiser's dream

That authenticity also appeals to advertisers, who get raw feedback on everything from whether McDonald's or Burger King has better hamburgers to whether Britney Spears is still hot to what teens are doing on New Year's Eve. And because Bolt's audience is composed of such a wide range of teenagers, advertisers are able to target their ads to specific age groups and localities (Bolt members must provide their birthdate and zip code when registering). While Bolt doesn't use individual users' real names, advertisers can nonetheless target an ad, for example, to females under 18 living in the Northeast who visited the Poetry & Writing section of the site in November 1999.

Brits n' Britney

While the company has an established presence in the United States, company CEO Pelson is hoping to expand Bolt's popularity worldwide. Bolt already has over 60,000 members in Britain - its largest concentration outside of North America - and the global numbers are growing rapidly, with close to a third of the site's audience coming from outside the U.S. Bolt also provides acces to it's site via UK-, Canada- and Australia-specific URLs.

Growing stronger

Bolt ended 1999 on a strong note as it closed its second round of investment that year, attracting big bucks from a group that included Time Warner, Comcast Interactive Corporation, Entercom Communications Corp., America Online, and Ford Motor Company. In fact, Ford is more than an investor in Bolt Media - one of the company's projects is the launch of cars.bolt.com in partnership with Ford, which will allow site visitors to design their own cars and submit them to Ford for prizes. In December 1999, the company allied itself with America Online to develop and manage a new co-branded platform of community services for AOL's teen channel. Bolt also created a co-branded site with AOL, allowing AOL members access to Bolt's content. Other projects include "Bolt Indies", a teens-only national film festival designed to provide teenage filmmakers with a channel to distribute their work.