The prominence Hip gives to the Webzine is something that is currently under review. Experience has shown that Hip's more "corporate" clients, the ones who pay the bills, do not necessarily want their corporation's image to mirror Hip's.
The Webzine's prominence within Hip does, however, reflect the origins of the company and the direction in which Dick Hardt originally saw Hip going. The choice of "Hip" as the company name for example, and the "hip" image cultivated by the Webzine were both deliberately chosen, an attempt to explicitly associate this company with a new media format, which was being presented as "cutting edge" by the mainstream media at the time.
The World Wide Web has had a brief and rapid rise. The first line-mode browser was only made available to the general public in January of 1992, with Mac and Windows versions following in the Fall of 1993 (Wiggins, 1995). With the availability of these easy-to-use tools, the World Wide Web (or "Web" for short) "took off" as a publication medium. Although it was essentially a toy for the technically competent when it first emerged, the Web's rapid growth quickly caught the attention of mainstream print media outlets, creating a "buzz" in magazine and newspaper articles. The Web's underlying infrastructure - the suite of networking protocols that bind the Internet together - had been around as a technology for well over a decade, but none of its earlier guises had managed to shed the image of "geeks talking to other geeks." The Web changed all that: the Web was hot.
The sort of growth exhibited by traffic on the Web naturally attracted the interest of entrepreneurs, who saw the business opportunities it presented. Hip Communications was founded in response to these opportunities, and the Hip Webzine was seen as a prototype for future Web-related revenue generating activities. Advertising was one revenue source that Dick Hardt hoped to tap into through the Webzine. (7) Another was the telepersonal ad market, a business that was already quite active. An Internet implementation of telepersonals could use the Webzine as a "front end" for an online version of such ads, with revenue prospects from those wishing to view, or place, such ads.
In its first incarnation, though, the Webzine was presented as an online outlet of opinion on issues of popular culture. Issues 1 through 4 of the Webzine appeared weekly, beginning in September of 1994. A gap in publication followed, with Issue 5 appearing in late November or early December, delayed by the loss of staff members. With the commencement of my internship, Dick Hardt hoped to get the Webzine back on a consistent publication schedule, so that readers could anticipate its appearance, and, he hoped, incorporate a regular visit into their routines.