Alan Meckler sold his company to Penton Media in 1998, then bought back the one piece Penton did not want: the websites. Those sites became internet.com. By June 1999 it ran 61 websites, 43 email newsletters and 55 discussion forums, all about the internet industry itself. Every dot-com needed programmers, marketers and investors who wanted to know what was happening. internet.com went public to sell ads against their attention, at the height of the boom it covered.

Bought Back From Penton

Meckler's Mecklermedia ran Internet World trade shows and magazines. Its web arm had operated since December 1994, with sites called MecklerWeb and iWorld. When Penton Media bought Mecklermedia in November 1998, it decided the internet business did not fit. Meckler bought 80.1 percent of a new company, internet.com LLC, that held those sites. He kept building a network of news and how-to sites for developers, webmasters and internet investors, based in Westport, Connecticut.

From Jupiter to QuinStreet

internet.com sold 3.4 million shares at $14 each in June 1999 and listed on Nasdaq as INTM. The dot-com crash cut its ad revenue, and the company renamed itself several times, becoming INT Media Group and then Jupitermedia. It sold its Jupiterimages photo business to Getty Images for $96 million and the internet.com sites to QuinStreet for $18 million in 2009. The remaining company became Mediabistro, then Mecklermedia, and ended its SEC registration in 2018.

Cover: The Newspaper, James Tissot. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a man absorbed in the newspaper (trade news).