My understanding is that a lot of it involved VCs finally getting tired of having their money wasted on irrational stock hyper-inflation followed by stunning crashes when people figured out just how little CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet does.
Quote:...Surprisingly, this money party did not go on forever. Stockholders across the globe soon found that the companies they invested in were incapable of actually making money through outside sources, and the dot com bubble burst. Countless businesses which shouldn't have existed in the first place went under. Dozens of office buildings in San Francisco were filled with cement to seal the evil contained within forever. Landfills overflowed with discarded scooters, some of which were still attached to their hipster owners due to mishaps with crazy glue. Everyone got a good laugh out of those guys during an otherwise bleak time, but no one thought to save or at least feed them, and eventually they starved to death.
This leads us to 2004, when the phrase Web 2.0 first pops up in all of its retarded splendor.
I remember right before the big dot.com craze you could get up to 20 cents per banner click. Traffic on a web site was everything. You could have host www.whatbadgerseat.com and if you got 1000 hits a day you were rolling in the dough. Alot of private investors would invest in any company that got hits. Then advertisers stopped paying for banner clicks (probably because they weren't getting their money back which is why they only pay you now when the banner clicker actually buys something). Web sites that were very large but served no purpose lost a lot of funding cause they weren't producing income. Most of the sites with poor business models had to shutdown. Not the cause of the bust but a side-effect of it for smaller dot.com companies.
I've experienced the whole DotCom hype from beginning to end, and my personal speculation is that suddenly the notion appeared that people weren't actually willing to *pay* for online content, which was assumed to be true up to that point. A lot of business models were based upon revenues which had to come from micro-payments and/or advertising, but it didn't work and while the market was being swallowed by the big guys, investors started to withdraw their money which more or less resulted in a 'reversed-hype' that basically normalized the market. Again, this is my personal experience in the field, I'm not an economist :)
I would like to add that in 1995-1998, the internet was a shiny and fancy thing to everyone. There were plenty of computer shows on TV, everyone was talking about the importance of being online, etc. The number of "connected" people was always expanding. Everyone was assuming that computer technology would keep progressing very fast, that there would always be a large supply of new customers wanting to be connected, and that soon, the use of virtual reality would grow, that it would become the "technology of tommorow"... See "Johnny Mnemonic" for a view of what people saw as the "future of the internet".
What people didn't realise is that people won't buy something they have no need for, which is expensive, and in which there is no guaranteed enjoyment (eg: virtual reality). They also didn't realise that once "everyone" was connected, nobody else would jump in. The fact is, most people were going to connect, but there will always be a certain percentage of the population who don't care about the internet, don't want the internet, or are simply afraid of technology in general.
Since there was no *big* change in the way we use the internet in the last 10 years (No, I don't count blogs and google as *big* changes), there was no renewed interest, and the internet just became a fact of life for everyone. Let's face it... People may still be using *web browsers* 15 years from now, and you may actually never have a use for VR goggles. That's just how things are. People want the internet as a useful commodity... They don't share twisted cyberpunk ideals from some strange novels.
Now that the internet is a commodity and isn't progressing, there is not much market expansion. There are online sales (ebay holds the biggest part), online advertisement (google, spam companies), online gaming, online pr0n... Online music and media... The internet is just a reflection of what you find in the real world. It's not that much of a "new" market. It just helps globalisation for the most part, and provides opportunities for some companies as a side effect.
I actually came up with the answer to life, the universe, and everything last week. I explained it to my esteemed colleague Ravuya, and he seemed to agree. Since then, I've been applying the answer to every question, and so far, I have yet to find an instance where the answer doesn't make sense.
So, without further ado, I hereby grandly premiere The Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything:
(drumroll) (tension) (hushed whispering)
People are stupid.
(gasps) (shouting) (applause)
Why did the .com bust happen? People are stupid.
See?
Brilliant!
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My signature is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My signature, without me, is useless. Without my signature, I am useless.
Quote:Original post by abstractimmersion perhaps, but Greenspan is known as the guy who "made central banking work."
in a related note, the fed was established in 1913 to "protect the value of the dollar." since then it has dropped in value 95%.
I don't trust central banking, and I don't ever trust a private monopoly over a country's currency.
And the vast majority of that drop was due to comming off the gold standard, which A) needed to be done or else we'd be even more fucked now, and B) would have been done with or without the fed.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My signature is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My signature, without me, is useless. Without my signature, I am useless.
Quote:Original post by ChurchSkiz I remember right before the big dot.com craze you could get up to 20 cents per banner click. Traffic on a web site was everything. You could have host www.whatbadgerseat.com and if you got 1000 hits a day you were rolling in the dough. Alot of private investors would invest in any company that got hits. Then advertisers stopped paying for banner clicks (probably because they weren't getting their money back which is why they only pay you now when the banner clicker actually buys something). Web sites that were very large but served no purpose lost a lot of funding cause they weren't producing income. Most of the sites with poor business models had to shutdown. Not the cause of the bust but a side-effect of it for smaller dot.com companies.
Hell, anyone remember that company that PAID you to have a banner ad bar installed on your browser? I got $100 out of them before they went under. And I never even saw a single ad, heh.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My signature is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My signature, without me, is useless. Without my signature, I am useless.
Quote:Original post by ChurchSkiz Most of the sites with poor business models had to shutdown.
Lots of them had no business model! MarkR has a nice story about it from when he worked at an Internet company during the dotcom boom and bust. I'll send him a pm asking him to indulge us with it!
ToDoList.GrowthRate = WorkRate*2, it's more efficient to not work.
Quote:Original post by ChurchSkiz I remember right before the big dot.com craze you could get up to 20 cents per banner click. Traffic on a web site was everything. You could have host www.whatbadgerseat.com and if you got 1000 hits a day you were rolling in the dough. Alot of private investors would invest in any company that got hits. Then advertisers stopped paying for banner clicks (probably because they weren't getting their money back which is why they only pay you now when the banner clicker actually buys something). Web sites that were very large but served no purpose lost a lot of funding cause they weren't producing income. Most of the sites with poor business models had to shutdown. Not the cause of the bust but a side-effect of it for smaller dot.com companies.
Hell, anyone remember that company that PAID you to have a banner ad bar installed on your browser? I got $100 out of them before they went under. And I never even saw a single ad, heh.
my friends and I set up a web ring where we would click on eachother's banners every day. We had a plan to get rich too: automating a disconnect/reconnect to aol to assign a new ip address and then clicking on the banner. We probably spent 2 weeks planning how to spend the thousands of dollars we would make, and then cried when we only made $20. The good ol' days.
There's a documentary film, Startup.Com, that captures quite nicely the essence of the boom and bust, how companies were getting VC before even having a product, and the inevitable consequences.
In the movie (which follows the birth and death of govworks.com), they start with 8 employees, one year later they have over 200 employees, then 2 yrs later, bankruptcy.
