Marketing Against The Tide: Go Where Rivals Fear To Tread

Business 2.0 magazine, founded in 1989, rode the "New economy" to extraordinary success. In its second year of publication, it sold 2,000 pages of advertising, perhaps a record for a monthly newsstand magazine. But its fortunes collapsed with the burst of the dot-com bubble. Companies cut their ad pages and the bloated magazine shrank to a mere ghost of its former size. While the companies were running like rats from a sinking ship, Wharton Professor David Reibstein points out that the shrinking competition could have made this an ideal time to advertise in the publication.