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In explaining his decision to concentrate solely on FuckedCompany, Kaplan says, "I have a lot of ideas, so I get in over my head a lot. I mean, at one point I had PK Interactive going, I had FuckedCompany going, and I was in a band. It was sort of a roll of the dice which one should I really focus on more. I had to make a decision, and that kind of thing happens to me a lot."

Since then, Kaplan has hired one full-time assistant, who answers the several hundred E-mail messages he receives each day and basically tries to organize Kaplan and keep his life running. Kaplan has also brought in a partner. "It's just not something I'm really ready to talk about," he says.

This past March, Kaplan launched his subscription service. "I figured out how to make money," he says. "I knew what I had was really valuable because people kept asking me, 'Do you have any information on this company? Do you have any information on that company?' When you get 100 E-mails like that a day, and you have that information, you realize that you can start selling it. An old-fashioned Web site would have just made it available for free. It's useful information just packaged in a rude way, but if you need to use it for business purposes and you can get past the rudeness, then you'll find its value."

As for advertising, "it's totally all over the place," Kaplan says. The site used to make a lot of money on advertising -- until the online-ad market fell through the floor. So for a while there was no way Kaplan could use one month's ad revenues to predict what the next month's would be. Then late last spring, he devised a plan that automated the ad-buying process. A new page on the site now lets advertisers and agencies place an ad on FuckedCompany and pay with a credit card. "I noticed that we were still selling tons of T-shirts and tons of subscriptions, and I think that the reason was that you could just use your credit card, and it would be done," Kaplan says. "And as soon as we did that with ads, I started getting advertising again. Instead of hiring an ad salesperson, I was like, 'This is stupid. Why don't I just make a thing where you can type in your credit card?' So now it sits there by itself and does the job of a person."

One thing is for sure: Kaplan's alarm clock is gone for good. "Sometimes I spend literally all day and all night on the site," he says. "And then sometimes I just spend an hour or two." Updating the front page takes maybe two hours. That's a sort of daily minimum for Kaplan, but he quickly adds, "I don't really look at it as work. I'm so into what I'm doing, I can't put it down."

Some in the dot-com industry question how long FuckedCompany's allure will last, given that the Internet bust is starting to feel like yesterday's news. Will the site's fans become inured to its relentless litany of bad tidings, and will FuckedCompany lose its cachet? Kaplan indicates that so far, the site has outlasted even his own original projections. "I've been saying 'another two weeks' for the past year. It has definitely confounded my expectations," he says. "You tell me: When are Internet businesses going to stop going out of business? Well, the answer is never."

Furthermore, he suggests that the site has filled a niche that no one else can occupy. "I figure companies will never stop going out of business, so I figure my company is OK," he says. "I mean, layoffs stopped being news six months ago, and I have more traffic and more subscribers than ever, so ..."

As for future plans -- well, let's put it this way: Philip Kaplan is considerably less forthcoming than Pud. "Yeah, I have a lot of things that I am working on, but I can't say," he hedges, smiling. Kaplan does acknowledge, however, that he's "working on some new sites" that could be linked to FuckedCompany.

One thing does seem likely to hang in there: the site's awful -- or, depending on your point of view, wonderful -- name. At a FuckedCompany party hosted by Kaplan this past July at San Francisco's Cloud 9 Motel (it's actually a bar and nightclub), Max Young, Cloud 9's owner, introduced his father, Bob, to Kaplan. Bob Young is a retired TV sales executive who now works as a media consultant and is a big fan of Kaplan's site. At age 67, he was easily the oldest guy at the party. "I introduced myself to Phil," Young recounts. "I told him, 'I love the site, and I will tell you why: it's a great source.' Phil said, 'Great.' He looked around the room and said, 'There just aren't enough women here.' And I said, 'In that case, maybe you should change the name of the site!' And he just smiled and laughed. You could see the twinkle in his eye."

Change the name of the site?

Not a chance, dude.

Not a fucking chance.

Gay Jervey is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

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