Wolff: Has Mother Nature found key to Web success?

• Media business works only when there is 'good-feeling' center
• Digital content world has succeeded with 'cool' factor
• Blending those two looks easy but seems hard to define

Let me try to define a really profound lack of coolness:

Here I am in a minivan on the West Side of Manhattan with a bunch of middle-age executives and their wives talking about their golf games and heading out to New Jersey to see a Rolling Stones concert.

In fact, my search for a sort of sweet-spot centrality and middle-of-the-road harmony, was exactly what had brought me here, among the executives, board members, friends and advertisers involved with Mother Nature Network, the Atlanta-based site that has as one of its founders Chuck Leavell, who for 30 years has played keyboard for The Rolling Stones — hence, the good house seats.

My search has not been precisely for the uncool, but for a content brand that might succeed in digital form that is as broad and inclusive and deep and horizontal as great American magazine titles used to be — and that might command advertising prices as high.

My theory here is that the media business only really works when there is a mass-market, big-consensus, good-feeling center. That's where the money and the audience concentrate, ultimately overflowing to cooler, vertical, niche efforts.

The digital content world, on the other hand, has grown up almost exclusively in the narrow cast, targeted, cool sector. Indeed, digital success, such as it is, comes from distinguishing yourself in a non-mass way: snark, attitude, political extremes, outré tabloidism, double reverse irony. (The mass market, to the extent it exists, is ephemera — cat videos.) This is success that isn't large enough to build and sustain an industry. In the end, everybody has bitten off such a little piece of the market that nobody, save for Google, has enough heft to make a proper advertising market.

It's one of the crucial digital questions. How come no big reader- and advertiser-friendly franchises — in the style of Hearst, Time Inc. or Condé Nast — have grown up to comparable size in the digital world, neither in native form, nor as extensions of any of the classic print titles?

Magazines in their most lucrative years — from the 1960s until the 1990s — built multimillion-reader audiences around lifestyle-identifying subjects and a precisely calibrated tone that attracted advertisers who would pay an ever-increasing price for an ever-increasing audience. These were businesses that could annually generate hundreds of millions of dollars with, no matter the number of martini lunches, fabulous margins.

It certainly seemed reasonable to assume that this model would find a new and — without paper, printing and delivery costs — even more profitable digital form and propel the media business to even greater value.

Instead the opposite happened: Audiences fractured; advertising prices declined.

In a world of unlimited, no-barrier-to-entry sites, everybody drifted to atomized interests. And in a world where the efficacy of advertising can be easily measured, advertisers could now see what their ads were really worth.

The business-killing, almost nihilistic, assumption has now become that the digital universe is inhospitable to general-interest content and that no minds are great enough to make advertisers pay top dollar for a distracted audience and unlimited space.

But now, enter my band of the uncool.

Four years ago, Joel Babbit, then a 55-year-old Atlanta-based regional ad executive with an eye on corporate green budgets, starts talking to The Rolling Stones' Leavell, who has a vast tree farm just south of Macon, Ga., and who is a well-known supporter of environmental causes.

Each is as non-native a digital type as it's possible to imagine. But Babbit has a deep background in what brands want and how to sell to them. And Leavell has, after a lifetime in rock 'n' roll (before The Rolling Stones, he was with The Allman Brothers), a preternatural sense of the cultural middle.

Their product, Mother Nature Network (www.mnn.com), would be recognizable to any old (and now possibly out-of-work) publishing pro. It's helpful. It's feel-good. It's reaffirming. It centralizes a set of attitudes that defines and celebrates the mainstream.

The environment, in other words, becomes the general metaphor — like the home has been often used in magazines — to gather people of goodwill and aspirational interests. Southern Living, owned by Time Inc., was once a great regional magazine title, and Mother Nature Network feels like an updated version.

MNN will do $6 million this year on 4 million unique monthly visitors. That's a long way from an old-time magazine bonanza but far greater than the digital norm. Most 4-million-monthly-unique-visitor sites will make, with luck, closer to $1 million a year. Indeed, MNN has just acquired Treehugger.com, another leading site in the category with similar traffic, but a fraction of MNN's income — meaning MNN will double its size next year and, potentially, its money.

This is because MNN speaks a fondly familiar media language — home, health, family, now called the environment. And it is because Babbit sells ads the old-fashioned way, offering big brands (Coke, AT&T, Mercedes, Delta, UPS, Allstate, Wal-Mart) old-fashioned virtue and a mainstream audience. He does this with a deep Rolodex, selling not to 26-year-old media buyers, but to chief marketing officers — and by handing out good concert seats.

It almost looks easy. Find the zeitgeist and water it down a little.

The mass market in the media business, a place of vast audiences, eager advertisers and a sense of national well-being — shrinks ever more, every day. But maybe it doesn't have to.

Anyway, that's what you start to think heading out to see The Rolling Stones, with a car full of 60s guys (in their 60s and of the '60s), recalling less-challenging and more-profitable and optimistic days.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com and on Twitter, @MichaelWolffNYC.