Hollywood film directors know what it means to win an Academy Award: It means guaranteed investors for the next project.
The Well's executive director, Gail Williams, is not so sure what it means for a Web site to win a Webby. She tactfully said that for The Well, winning a Webby had "a fairly subtle effect."
"People who are new to the industry and don't recognize The Well, we can tell them 'we won the Webbys.' It didn't drive a lot of traffic here, but it gave us some credibility," Williams said.
The race is on for online awards to become the Oscars of the Net. The Webbys, in a move toward legitimacy, if not supremacy, has enlisted PricewaterhouseCoopers, the organization that audits the Oscars, to audit its awards. Focusing on the cosmetic, The Cool Site of the Year awards recently signed Robin Leach, the celebrity's celebrity, to host its January awards show.
Cool Site founder Glenn Davis is more blunt. "I think that none of the awards have any meaning. They're not being done right," he said, citing the need for independent judging organizations. For the first CSOTY awards in 1996, coolmeister Davis chose his favorite 1995 sites and let site visitors vote on winners.
"Now my bastard child is encouraging people to whore [for their sites]," Davis lamented. "Sites are able to encourage their audience to vote for them."
Lance Arthur, CSOTY award winner for Glassdog, also questioned the way winning sites are chosen. "Cool Site of the Year is a popularity contest," he said. "I had something on my site which asked people to go vote for me and I think that active solicitation was basically how I got the award."
The Webbys responded to criticisms like these by creating an Oscar-style International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The IADAS' nominating branch selects Webby nominees in each award category, and then experts in each category select the winners. The Academy automatically inducts winners of past Webbys but they cannot nominate their own sites. "These past winners are naturals for nominating the best Web sites," said Tiffany Shlain, the Webbys' executive producer. "They're in the field and they know what's excellent."
Maya Draisin, the Academy's managing producer, points out that final judges, like California Senator Barbara Boxer (politics) or Kevin Smith (film), are experts in their fields, but not necessarily Web authorities. "We use experts who work on the Web daily to narrow the scope of nominees while final judges have expertise in their category and can judge the best in any medium."
Shlain and Draisin stressed that in addition to the Webby Awards, they bestow People's Voice awards during the Webbys webcast for sites nominated by Academy judges and voted upon by visitors to the site.
Glassdog's Arthur said that the Webbys Academy is a "step in the right direction" and more authoritative than CSOTY's popular (and corruptible) voting process, but he still wondered about the criteria for choosing judges. "Dennis Rodman is a judge," said Arthur. "I question the celebrity factor, which seems necessary to get viewer attention, but how much do some of these people know about the Web?"
Digital Hollywood award nominees are chosen by the DH Board of Advisers -- which includes such swanky names as Excite's Joe Kraus and Macromedia prez Norm Meyrowitz -- and then voted upon by DH site visitors.
Executive director Victor Harwood said that the Digital Hollywood board "was chosen to represent a wide range of expertise in the technology and entertainment industries. While no process is perfect, we feel that inclusion of individuals and their preferences was consistent with the nature of personal involvement on the Internet."
So which process and which awards show will win out? Gail Williams shrugged off differences between the way sites are nominated and says that the important movement is toward industry-specific awards, not omnipotent über-awards bodies. "It's tough to think that this is one industry and that one kind of award could suffice for all. I think we'll see the awards shows splitting off into industry awards, like for the manufacturing industry and the print industry even though right now the big general awards are very important," Williams said.
Arthur is more cynical. "The show with the most ad sponsorship money will be the most successful," he said. "If you're making money, you'll stick around."
