Anyone who has ever taken driver’s education classes knows that there is nothing like pictures of a car wreck to focus the mind on humanity’s capacity for error. On-line media properties, and their investors, have endured a similarly sobering lesson. Analysts and reporters have ably chronicled the mistaken assumptions and pure hubris that accompanied the rise and fall of on-line media sites such as Drkoop.com, Go.com, and Oxygen. In the seven slides that follow, we dig further into the story by examining the economics of on-line media and comparing those economics to those of their off-line counterparts. As our analysis shows, on the World Wide Web, the gap between business plan and market reality was even deeper than suspected. Most on-line media properties were doomed from the start.