The
Internet can be supported through advertising- Practically
every day our venture capital firm receives a business plan predicated
on advertising revenue for success. Give away computers? Make
it up in advertising. Free e-mail and web hosting? Advertisers will
drool over your targeted mailing list. But advertising supported services
have rarely subsidized a business at a rate greater than 30
cents per person per hour. So, an individual incurring only $1000/year
in web costs might cover their expenses with a user base of 100 visitors
- provided each spends a few minutes every day surfing their content.
A larger site, burning ten million dollars a year needs a million active
users each day, or they will never emerge from debt. With only 50 million
users on line, how many large sites can survive?. And the middle is
squeezed even tighter from both ends..... (These slides are from my
March 1999 keynote address at
the Advertising Research Foundation entitled "Advertising the Future"). [Note added in 2006- these numbers are still about right. All that has changed is the number of internet users, and the hours they spend on-line. Fortunately, with free-user supplied content, internet access paid for by the web surfer, and cheap computing, many sites can lower their costs far enought to match their advertising income].
The
pace of civilization is spiraling out of control- Well, this
one is partially true. Everyday, people are assaulted by a rising tide
of messages- whether e-mail, TV shows, advertisements, faxes,
or other interruptions. But how fast are these seductive bits of distraction
growing? A reasonable estimate, shown in this
figure, is the number of messages grows by about a factor of 10
per century. Remarkably, this growth is relatively constant, but of
course shifts from telegraphy to telephony, from letters to e-mail.
Since our time is fixed and numbered, a 10x growth implies each message
demands, on average, 10 times less attention. So its no wonder the art
of letter writing and long afternoon strolls languishes in the
past. Perhaps there is a small comfort to realize the 10x growth rate
is neither a recent phenomena, nor too fast for society to hope for
an uneasy truce.
Better
User Interfaces, like browsers, unleashed today´s exponential Internet
growth from a techie to a mass market- Patently false. As
the enclosed graph illustrates,
the number of host computers on the net has been growing at a constant
rate since the mid 70´s. The net itself has evolved from DarpaNet to
Bitnet to UUCP to the Internet (as seen in each sub-curve that rises
and then falls), but as one service is subsumed, the next continues
its relentless beat. Netscape, in 1994, had no discernible effect on
the growth of the Internet. What did happen in 1994 was the number of
users crossed a million. Which meant either you, or someone you knew,
was on-line. Had the WWW and browser not been invented, AOL and Compuserve
would have become even bigger- serving the same user needs for information,
communication and curiosity in a different, more proprietary way.
