The Great Web Wipeout

I see that I am the first to take advantage of the new two in the morning time extension. Here is a comb over of this article.

This article might seem irrelevant, because it is now around a decade old. However I don't believe that this article stepped too far out of its boundries. It didn't make any rash predictions, or suggest and ideas that never really came to be. It more so remained focused on its main theme, and that is the death of so man of the so called dotcoms during what was supposed to be the great media revolution.

The article highlights two main reasons as to why this complete collapse of profitable websites occured. The two are closely related to each other, as we can see that one reason would be the eventual cause for the other. The first reason sited in the article is what the article refers to as the provider's "general inability to add bandwidth." For those of us who are not entirely computer savey, what this basically means is that sites were getting more hits than they were capable of handling, forcing them to become "off the net" at some point on a daily basis because of overload. The reaction to this then, was that people were simply going to smaller sites that had less hits. This by itself is a problem, yes, but what it would eventually lead to would prove to be the nail in the coffin, so to speak, for many providers on the web.

As we all know, free websites depend entirely on advertisement dollars to turn a profit. Once advertisers got wind of the over load on their respective sites, investigations were carried out in order to find out how many users were actually getting to see their articles, and also for how long. The article states that advertisement expenses were at some point around 15 dollars a hit for some websites. After investigations however, it was found that users that did access the sites, were generally only there for a matter of minutes. On top of this, it was also found that 90 percent of the hits were not even real users, but rather produced by "spiders" and "crawlers." At this discovery, prices for advertising dipped all the way down to a dollar for every thousand hits.

My favorite idea touched upon by this article, was the comparison of heavily used sites such as Yahoo.com, among many others (especially in the present day, ten years later), with big time corporations such like Wal Mart, calling the sites the Wal Marts of web advertising, which "drove the price points into the basement."

I would now ask, after reading this article, in todays world, has the "media revolution," which was thought to be occuring back in 1996 six, occured yet? Was the great web wipe out simply a case of entreprenuers getting too far ahead of themselves and attempting to accomplish goals that they did not yet have the means to accomplish? Do we have the means now, in the present day?