Will Highbrow Smut Sell in Frankfurt?

Genevieve Field and Rufus Griscom understand the importance of foreplay. When they first conceived their e-zine, back in 1997, they wooed the press, which loved telling this story: Manhattan couple starts smutzine in love nest, where they edit manuscripts and subsist on funding pulled together from friends. Two years later, Nerve has become an edgy, albeit still smutty, cyberforum of smart commentary by the likes of Spalding Gray, Rick Moody, and Naomi Wolf, with investigative articles and tasteful nude photography. And it seems to have become a real business. Nerve attracts 750,000 unique visitors a month--96% of whom have college degrees and 40% of whom are women, according to Griscom. Advertisers like AOL, IBM, and Mitsubishi want to reach that crowd and have helped Nerve drive up revenues--the founders expect to take in $10 million next year. Now, in a plan to leverage the brand--think the body of Jennifer Lopez with the sensibility of The New Yorker--Nerve is looking to turn www.nerve.com into a portal and possibly launch an IPO. The company has already published two spinoff books and aims to start a bimonthly print magazine in early 2000. It recently doubled its staff to 20 and went live with Websites in Spanish, French, and German. In mid-October it will launch the portal, in the form of an online community called NerveCenter, complete with chat rooms, message boards, free home-page building, personals, and e-mail. Diversifying with the portal should help give Nerve more sex appeal in the eyes of investors. After three rounds of financing, which raised $1.9 million from the likes of Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor and Wired co-founder Louis Rosetto, Nerve is considering going public in Germany rather than the U.S.