Snowball.com had a name for its audience: Generation i, people aged 13 to 30 who treated the internet as part of daily life. Its biggest site was IGN, the Imagine Games Network, which covered video games with news, reviews and guides. Snowball wanted to build a whole network around that crowd. When it went public in March 2000, it was the very top of the dot-com boom, and ad-supported websites for teenagers looked like a fortune.

Born Inside a Magazine Company

IGN launched on September 29, 1996, as five websites inside Imagine Media, a magazine publisher founded by Chris Anderson. Gaming fans came for news and reviews, and they came back every day. Imagine spun the web business out, and it took the name Snowball. The bet was that gamers were just the first of many young audiences. Snowball added sites for other interests and sold ads and goods to all of them.

IGN Outlasted Snowball

Snowball priced its shares at $11 in March 2000 and listed on Nasdaq as SNOW. The dot-com crash had already begun, and ad money soon dried up. Snowball shut or sold most of its sites and kept the one that worked. In May 2002 it renamed itself IGN Entertainment. News Corp bought IGN for $650 million in 2005. In 2013 News Corp sold it to Ziff Davis, which still owns IGN.

Cover: Making a Giant Snowball, Suzuki Harunobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a giant snowball (Snowball).