More Info than Brains

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Silicon Alley Insider, perhaps as a macabre obsession. It’s fun to scroll through the articles, and mark the business models as advertising, advertising or … advertising.

Then, try heading over to Wikipedia’s entry on the first dot-com bubble and read it with those SAI articles in mind. Remember to smile innocently as you slowly back out of the room, as if you’d just walked in on some sort of disgusting Vampire-Orgy.

In the ’90s people saw the Internet and it looked like retail space on Times Square just came available for $0/sq. ft. They thought, “I could sell so many toys/books/bongs … Yoho! I’m going to be richer than the King of England! (in my mind, people are always medieval serfs)”

Well, that didn’t exactly work out.

So some of those people, the survivors, looked at the Internet and thought, “damn, there HAS to be a way to make money with this thing … it’s just sooooo cooool. And it is, I will give them that.

Then the idea came; “if we can’t make money, maybe we can sell advertising to other people who are trying to make money!” So all the dot-coms start selling advertising (keep survey of the companies mentioned on SAI for one week), many of them to other dot-coms who are trying to sell advertising (do you hear the hissing?).

Someone, somewhere, has to actually sell a good or service to a real customer.