Just who, however, was reading the Web areas of the _N & O_ and other Internet publications? The _Washington Post_ and many other dailies had chosen to avoid the Net for the moment because they thought that the right people weren’t there. And some marketers and journalists tried to reinforce such arguments by citing a study of 4,777 Web readers by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ninety-four percent were men, and 56 percent were 21-30 years old—almost half were students or faculty members or had other university ties. “These are hardly the type of people to make large consumer or business purchases,” a _San Francisco Chronicle_ story observed. The experience of JoAnn and Bob Lilienfeld, as recounted in chapter 2, showed that riches would not automatically come to merchants on the Web. And yet the potential was there. The Web readers uncovered by the institute weren’t charity cases—just yups. Studying the readers of the Baseball server, the _N & O_ found they were a long way from poverty. Twenty percent of these Netfolks, for example, earned $35,000-$50,000 a year, 18 percent earned $50,000-$75,000, and 4 percent earned more than $75,000. And, of course, many of these Netfolks were young people who would carry their Net habit over to their jobs and their personal lives. Not surprisingly, Schlukbier claimed keen interest from representatives of companies such as J.C. Penney and Radio Shack, and, of course, from fast-food chains, which, in so many cases, targeted their ads at the young. Cleverly the _N & O_ built on existing relationships with advertisers. If you were already on the paper and bought _X_ number of lines, then you could get the Net as a bonus. North Carolina businesses paid as little as $50 a month in basic fees to be in the _N & O_’s area on the Net, not including add-ons such as design services. Big national firms would pay well into the thousands. Given the newness of the medium, this would scare off many—unless, like the _N & O_ itself, they saw the Net as an investment in the future. Then the experiment might work. In my mind, however, there was one other variable: What about _national_ publications competing with local papers for the same _national_ advertisers? Already Time Warner and the _N & O_ were watching each other carefully. Magazines: Time Warner Typing away on Macintoshes on the fortieth floor of the Time Life Building in Manhattan, ten floors above _People_ magazine, a small team started an area of the Web known as Pathfinder. It offered electronic versions of Time Warner’s vast stable of magazines. Zonker Harris at the _N & O_ had a slogan, “May the best server win.” The Durham newspapers might not be in the game so far, but _Time_ and brethren were.