Hula-Hoop It Up

Web site: www.theonion.com

Premiere date: May 1996

Description: Satire of current events. Recent articles include "450,000 Unsold Earth Day Issues of Time Trucked To Landfill" and "Congress Wonders If It's Even Making A Difference Anymore."

Impact: The Onion started as an underground Madison, Wisconsin, publication. The Web opened it up to an international audience. Covered in Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, The Onion has grabbed 2.6 million visits per month.

Today: Bigger than ever, The Onion is going multimedia. The Onion Radio News is heard by 9 million people each week. Dikkers and Haise's two books have both made The New York Times bestseller list. Next up: the big screen-DreamWorks recently signed a deal to turn an Onion article into a film.

This article was originally published in the July 2000 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Hula-Hoop It Up.