Does Misery Love F---edCompany.com?

The Nasdaq is crashing. Internet companies are slicing millions of dollars off their revenue estimates. And Net analysts are dusting off their long-forgotten sell ratings.

Perhaps this is a lousy time to launch an e-commerce business.

Not so, says Philip Kaplan, who operates the most famous vulgarly titled site on the Web, an operation we'll refer to as F---edCompany.com.

On Friday morning, Kaplan announced that he would start charging users for new features he has added to F---edCompany.com, which up until now has been a completely free online rumor mill chronicling the implosion of the Internet economy. And, judging from user response, the move has been an overwhelming success, he says.

Does this development signal an uptick in the outlook for Yahoo! (YHOO), a slightly more popular free site that, like F---edCompany.com, is trying to institute new services that will bring in cash from users? Unclear. But it apparently does mean that someone has found a new way to make money from the Internet's decline.

Since its launch last May, F---edCompany.com has become a useful resource for getting notice -- sometimes in advance -- of layoffs and shutdowns at numerous technology companies.

Gordon Hodge, a media analyst covering companies such as Yahoo! and AOL Time Warner (AOL) for Thomas Weisel Partners, says he's a F---edCompany.com reader."It's interesting to see and be aware of what's said about some of the companies I follow," he says. "Every now and then there proves to be a nugget that turns out to be prescient, even if it is written in an unusual style," he euphemistically adds.

Starting immediately, people who pay $75 per month will be able to receive all email that Kaplan receives, not just the rumors and emails he culls for posting on his site. These unpublished emails, which Kaplan hasn't made available previously, outnumber the ones he does make public by a ratio of greater than 10 to 1, according to Kaplan's numbers.

Additionally, subscribers will be able to search through the site's "Happy Fun Slander Corner," the site's chat board. Reading and posting to the chat board, as well as reading and searching through articles Kaplan has written under his pseudonym "Pud," will remain free.

Two hours after sending out an email announcing the new features, Kaplan said he'd already received 60 subscription requests. And judging from subscribers' email addresses, a fair number of them are venture capitalists or Wall Streeters. And the subscription business is profitable already, says Kaplan, whose day job is running the New York-based Internet software company PK Interactive. "If I sold one subscription for 75 bucks, I'd take you to dinner. ... That's profit," he says.

Hodge has no immediate plans to subscribe, he says. "But we're open-minded," he adds.

So what's Kaplan's advice for anyone else who wants to get in the e-commerce business? If Internet users want something new from your site, make them pay, he says. "You charge for every little thing you can do on a Web site, every button that somebody's going to want to push," he says. "F---edCompany.com now is frozen. ... I'm not going to write one line of code until that code makes me a dollar."

Hmm. Yahoo! has built itself up over the past half-decade by adding feature after feature for free. Maybe it will successfully embrace the F---edCompany model. Or maybe it will, like others, just be fodder for the site.

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