Brooklynite James Ravenell Jr. was not too pleased by the smattering of sites for African Americans. The 25-year-old part-time student and network administrator, who spends more than 10 hours a day online, complains that the Web pages were cold, slow and impersonal. "I didn't really like the features on the sites," he says.

    However, when he found his way to Black-Planet.com, an online community site for African Americans, he 'instantly signed up" the day it launched. This one had all the stuff I like to do in one spot." Compared with some of the other sites, Ravenell says, "there's a different energy there --when you come to BlackPlanet, you feel more at home." He told friends -- "like a couple of hundred of them," all around the country about the site. Thanks to Ravenell and others like him, BlackPlanet is one of the fastest growing niche sites on the Net. And the increase in traffic is being matched by sudden investor interest. with Microsoft, Time Warner and others rushing to capture the African-American audience.

    launched in September, BlackPlanet debuted just as talk of the "digital divide" reached a crescendo. Born out of a Commerce Department report, the so-called divide is based on statistics that show that blacks in general were only two-fifths as likely to be on the Internet compared with whites. Since 1994, the gap between the percentage of whites and African Americans who are online grew by 6 points.

    The issue of the digital divide has often camouflaged the viable and hungry market in African-American Internet services and content. The number of African Americans online is expected to have soared 42 percent by 2000, according to a Forrester Research study released in March 1999, fueling the growth of sites like BlackPlanet and NetNoir, the first site to cater to a black audience. (A December sur-vey conducted by Cyber Dialogue counts some 4.9 million black Internet users.) Moreover, other studies indicate that African Americans are more likely than the general online popula-tion to purchase goods over the Internet.

    What's more, coverage of the digital divide had reinforced assumptions by financiers and venture capitalists that the target market is lim-ited by social and economic forces. For businesses focusing on African Americans and other underserved audiences, funding has been hard to come by. "We couldn't get a penny from the venture capital community," says Don Rojas, CEO of The Black World Today, who a few months ago had difficulty even meeting with a venture capitalist. "There's a misperception that the African-American online market is not large enough to justify a major capital infusion"

    Misperception, indeed. While VCs were passing on black Internet businesses, Net users have been flocking to them: In its first month out of the gate, BlackPlanet, a unit of New York-based Community Connect that previously launched online community AsianAvenue.com, registered nearly 1o,ooo members and over 2 million pageviews. By mid-December, the site had shattered the 1oo,ooo members mark, pulling in some 40 million pageviews Ñ a veritable shocker considering its marketing was mostly through word of mouth. The site's biggest problem now isn't drawing users; it's keeping the servers from crashing.

    The surge in traffic "is something we estimat-ed we would do by the end of the year 2000," confesses Community Connect CEO Benjamin Sun. "It's on fire." Serious investment in sites for African Americans began with $35 million from Microsoft, USA Networks, and other major players to create BET.com, announced in August by Black Entertainment Television. The Black World Today Ñ a global news and information site, is negotiating for as much as $3 million from the MMG Group, a minority investment fund and other investors. The Urban Box Office Network, founded by film exec George Jackson of New Jack City fame, is about to land $20 million in strategic invest-ments from both MIT's Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte and Allen & Company, among others, according to sources close to the company, BlackVoices.com, a 3-year-Old com-munity site backed by the Tribune Company, is close to landing as much as $25 million from a variety of investors, says CEO Barry Cooper.

    Even Time Warner is pumping anywhere between $30 million to $60 million, sources say, Into a new HBO project that targets black and urban audiences with a music and lifestyle site, tentatively dubbed Volume. "There's definitely people slapping their fore-heads." says Jerry Colonna, Flatiron Partners' managing partner. "They're saying, 'Oh my God, no one's really captured this demographic in a dominant way yet.'"

    BET.com might have kick-started the current influx of capital, but it's worth noting that it already missed a November launch date. For good reason, explains BET.com COO Scott Mills: "The major overview [of our research] is that African Americans surf first as Web surfers, not first as African Americans. They surf secondarily as African Americans."

    This has sent BET.com execs scrambling for a new approach. Rather than appeal exclusively to African Americans, BET.com is widening its scope to include content and services amenable to both black and multicultural urban audiences. Others are following suit, recognizing that black music and hip-hop culture have universal appeal. Rapper cum technology evangelist Chuck D, hip-hop impresarios Russell Simmons and Sean "Puffy" Combs have all separately launched new Internet businesses that target broad-based urban tastes. "There's a sense that black entertainers are a force to be reckoned with in pop culture." says Omar Wasow, execu-tive director at BlackPlanet. "And that impact will translate into success on the Internet."

    Hip-hop site Hookt.com, for instance, is sell-ing investors on the idea that black culture is received equally by urban blacks and suburban whites Ñ not to mention others in between. "Hip-hop into the next millennium Is like rock going into the 50s," says CEO Chas Walker, not-ing SoundScan figures that say some 70 percent of hip-hop music in America was purchased by whites, "Hip-hop transcends race, gender and class and is definitely a global phenomenon. The company has already caught the eye of Flatiron, Walker says. Although he declined to discuss details, Hookt is planning to close a sec-ond financing round of about $15 million.

    The general investor fervor, some hope, will lift the discussion of black Internet businesses beyond the gloomy government data. "When-ever you talk about black people on the Net, the digital divide is the story," says BlackPlanet's Wasow. "It's going to change. As the next wave of sites go live, it will shift from the digital divide to the digital opportunity."