[A while ago I embarked on an article for this site; it was an expansion on a screed I wrote for work, which was built on a concept that smacked me in the face while I was writing an article for this site. Because that’s how it works.
That article had brief aspirations of being a book, but has now settled into a long-form piece that I will serialize here, for both of you to enjoy.]
Introduction.
Sometime in 1997 or 1998, I got a phone call from a recruiter who wanted to talk to me about an e-commerce opportunity. I remember it clearly because she had a voice like a Georgia sunset. E-commerce opportunity.
Nobody says “e-commerce” anymore, but at the time it was quite the buzzword. The undiscovered country of paying for things on or with the Internet1 - when most people still weren’t really sure about what the Internet was, or what we were going to do with it, or how we were going to protect our children from it. E-commerce was just what that recruiter said it was: an opportunity, to be discussed with just a little bit of awe.
Of course now it’s “AI.” In between, there has been “P2P” and “big data” and “Dot-com” and “gamification” and “blockchain” and maybe a half-dozen others. Always with the same breathless optimism and underlying ambiguity that makes our industry so much fun, and so challenging.
P2P and Blockchain and Big Data and some of the others settled down, and became important foundations for things like Venmo, Lyft, Netflix, Spotify, and Bitcoin. But e-commerce and dot-com evolved and merged, giving birth to another another outmoded term: the New Economy.
Outmoded, of course, because now it’s just the economy.
* * *
About 541 million years ago the planet underwent what’s called the Cambrian Explosion, where the right conditions triggered a dramatic and breakneck diversification of plant and animal life, radically new models with features like purposeful appendages and bilateral symmetry. This new population competed for resources and added new challenges to each other’s survival, prompting even more adaptation among those who persisted.
The late 1990s were analogously ripe for a different kind of explosion, let’s call it a Digital Explosion. Personal computing, video gaming, online communities, and importantly a Y2K-driven surge in software investment by businesses contributed to an environment that became primed for the emergence of entirely different phyla of businesses - or, put another way, new industries.
This book article focuses on one group of those strange, furry new animals, namely the business of content on the internet, and describes the conditions of a new era to which it will need to adapt. Specifically, we’re working with a very simple equation:
advertising impressions * ad fees = revenue
… and breaking down the tectonics behind that equation. Describing, as it were, the new challenges our little friend will face, and overcome, in order to survive; changes in online advertising, media consumption models, content creation strategies, and expanding privacy regulations.
And sure enough, AI has a part to play.
We used to capitalize Internet. The AP stylebook changed that in 2016, and part of me is still grumpy about it.