Like good comedy, a good business plan usually comes out of somebody else's misfortune. Today, simpleton offers, at no additional cost to you, two jimdandy proposals, carved out of the unlucky hide of American Cybercast. Back when the web was still in its Fritz Lang days, Cybercast brought in a little Simpson and Bruckheimer-level pizzazz, and broke wide with The Spot, webdom's first great effort to rip off tv. A generic mix of The Real World (without all the soulful liebestraum) and Friends (minus the in-your-face New York edginess), The Spot was emetic, jejune and, inevitably, a hit. With can't-miss appeals like a swimsuit edition and a graduated scale of dumbing down (by the end, even the fans were whispering that the plots were too stupid for words), The Spot enjoyed a period of 100,000+ pageview days, and a fanatical fan base.

But Cybercast also brought Simpson and Bruckheimer-level wastefulness to New Media. While Spot creator Scott Zakarin said producing episodic web dramas with actors costs about $100,000 per month (and at its peak, AmCy was producing four), even that burn rate doesn't explain the $6 million Cybercast is said to have burned through during an eight month period. And in the most compelling demonstration to date that the web is not Hollywood, Cybercast actually paid the price of wastrelsy, going belly-up in January, and leaving The Spot to say its fulsome farewells in June.

If only the story ended there...

Did we mention that the fan base was fanatical? Months after its death, The Spot is still enjoying a few thousand pageviews per day - nothing to move mountains, but more than most web sites (including this one) get in a month. All-dead content still has its attractions, as anybody who's whiled away an afternoon poking around one of those "Welcome to my homepage!" homepages can attest. The fact that so much of the web is undated (Are these "pictures of our party last June" from June of 1993, '97, what?) is part of the hypnotic effect, and at The Spot, whose "realness" was most of the attraction, it's not hard to imagine the lure of endless peeping-Tomery. On the site's message boards, where most of the action now takes place, Spotsters - when not making idle threats and calling each other gaylords - demonstrate a healthy (or more precisely, unhealthy) command of the show's esoterica - trading details about "Blair"'s drug treatment, speculating on "Hunter"'s future plans, hoping that "Michelle" may someday put out nude photos on the web (In fact, many nude photos of Kristin Herold, the actress who played Michelle, are already available here, but this may not count, since Ms. Herold wasn't in character at the time). In effect, the $100,000-per-month job of creating content for The Spot has been taken over by the fans.

It's easy to scoff at those fans, but who doesn't want a little fanatical loyalty? In addition to rubbing out The Spot, Cybercast's bankruptcy also left stranded The Pyramid and Eon-4, both of which had attracted their own cults. Spot fans still gather for fan conventions (the next one's on for October in Chicago, if you're interested), but the apparently devoted fan base for webisodic programming is being served poorly, or not at all. Grape Jam, Zakarin's post-Spot venture, has gone back to the cellar, probably for good; Time Warner's East Village (somebody say New York edginess?) hasn't been updated since August. And those tens of thousands of web soap-watchers are stuck in the wilderness, waiting for a new messiah.

And you may be the savior. How hard can it be, really, to turn out new content for such an undemanding audience? Or, for that matter, to do it with less prodigality than Cybercast showed in its march toward extinction? Given the spate of flops in episodic web programming, investors may not be enthusiastic, but audiences will be. It may be a hold-your-nose proposition, but there is a demand for soaps on the web, and sooner or later, somebody's going to satisfy it.

Still, making something new sounds like a lot of work; which leads to a second, more intriguing proposal. There's a lot of dead content out there, and apparently many people who want to look at it. Right now, those masses are visiting The Spot on a semi-regular basis, but nobody is reaping the rewards - with the possible exception of Toyota, whose banner ads still sit on the site, giving the company unlimited free advertising (like they need the help). You'd think the possibility of collecting token advertising fees (and with zero content costs that's all you'd need to make a profit), would inspire Cybercast to come to terms with its creditors, and start pulling in a little easy pocket change. In any event, these defunct sites could most likely be snatched up at firesale prices, and would furnish an ongoing going-out-of-business-sale revenue stream. For the time being, webisodic programming may be dead, but when was the last time you heard of a mortician going broke?