I think this was part of what Larry Page was trying to get across yesterday after Google released a bunch of services that (potentially) trounced many hotly contested competing services.
There's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
I guess I don't understand what Page was trying to communicate? That there is still room in this world for people to make a living, as long as Google decides they aren't interested in that market? Do we really need, for example, another music streaming service from Google/Facebook/Amazon when we already have _several_ excellent, focused, and competitive streaming services out there?
IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
I think he was trying to say that current competition is incredibly trivial.
I think the Google streaming service utilizes Google's ability to personalize tastes pretty well. At least, so far, it's exceeded my Spotify and Rdio experiences.
I was pretty surprised when I loaded up the free trial of Google Music All Access and right off the bat it suggested some smart playlists that I really agree with. It took me weeks/months on other services to get that level of recommendations.
But that being said, I do have my music collection on Google Play Music and listen from there, so Google had a head start already.
My guess is that it was worth it at that time. GeoCities was huuuge. It's where I started and many of the sites I would encounter at the time from search results were hosted on GeoCities. Ah, those were the days.
It does not matter what something is worth today. Five years from now it could be gone. I doubt GeoCities was the first, and it certainly is not the last, to suffer that fate.
This is very relevant now because rumors are that Yahoo is about to buy Tumblr for over a billion dollars. If they only took care of Geocities they would not have to buy it all over again in Tumblr form.
This wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least leverage Geocities a bit more than shutting it down:
Start Tumblr-style side venture. Pitch it to existing Geocities customers in various ways with advantages like shared logins and some semblance of import tool easing adoption. Let Tumblr roll on from that kick start. Eventually phase out or shut-down Geocities.
Different era.
Different CEO.
Different corporate culture.
Different demography.
Different way people use the internet.
Vastly different size of users.
Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much money.
I personally want tech industry to get away from 2-3 companies dominating. I want a new challenger, that could be yahoo (we don't know yet), but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt; and a chance to prove themselves under new leadership.
Geocities time came and went, and I don't actually blame Yahoo for that (though I do blame them for the way in which it was shut down, lots of people lost their content forever, we didn't get everything out in time).
As a portal it failed because the basic concepts of free accounts and uploading made it a haven for spammers, as a commercial concept it failed because bulk display advertising rates dropped through the floor during the .com bust and in spite of losing money Yahoo kept it running for many years.
To 'fix' geocities would have meant grandfathering in a few million accounts, re-inventing the service in a way that would make it profitable against the rise of the new homepage provider: facebook.
I personally don't think that is something that they could have done, not with Yahoo's image and the legacy they were still hauling along. It needed a clean break with the past and ditching Geocities gave Yahoo an opportunity to do just that (which they then subsequently mostly wasted).
Yahoo did the right thing, but they went about it in a terribly callous way. All they had to do was to deny google crawling access to geocities, freeze the uploads, allow account archival and deletion in an automated way (easy for them to do). That way we wouldn't have this gaping hole in the web today, and we wouldn't have desperate people trying to find their old stuff through whatever means possible.
I'm sure 1 fte and a few hundred bucks worth of bandwidth would have been a price worth paying for Yahoo given the dent it gave their image, it definitely was worth paying that much to me to try to keep it running.
Last time a startup went in and was killed. Rumour has it that they halt the progress of things till it's no longer relevant to the real world and then kill it.
Not to mention ABN Amro, which was effectively bailed out and nationalised during the global financial crisis. If only AltaVista had been considered too big to fail...
I say "effectively", because the many mergers and splits it went through in the 00s meant the large parts nationalise in the Netherland and the UK were not identical to what it was in '99 when this analyst was interviewed.
My first actually-online website was on Angelfire. I’ll never see it again, because:
1. It was auto-deleted after a period of inactivity,
2. The Wayback Machine doesn’t know about it, and
3. My local copy was deleted by Microsoft thanks to a bug in Windows. (I was moving a folder across my home network from my old Windows 98SE computer to an XP box, and when the move operation encountered a folder with an accented character in its name, the entire operation failed — and deleted all of the data that was to be moved.)
Well, the oldest I had called “Kids’ Rave Book Reviews” — KRBR for short — and I had started off what I vaguely hoped to be a community project by posting my review of The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm, which I had just re-read in sixth grade.
It should be noted that Geocities was a public company at the time with a market cap of $2.3b. But also that it generated only $7.5m in revenue the prior quarter.
What this tells me is that current perceived bubble isn't nearly what the 1999 one was, which is a good sign. Yahoo better take care of Tumblr and put extensive resources behind it.
i was a part of the team that bought GeoCities at Yahoo, and i think it wasn't as dumb of a deal as it looks on paper, because a) YHOO stock was so high at the time that the $3.8B wasn't actually all that dilutive, and b) buying GeoCities ensured Yahoo was the #1 destination online, and thus we could command a disproportionate share of ad revenue. If you wanna look at a really silly deal that Yahoo did, how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers...
Oh, those heads days! That a "website" could be bought for $3bn+ prodded a lot of young employees to say "WTF, let me quite my job and make a website.com". I should know, because I was one of them.
That Aol, Yahoo, and Geocities were the top sites on the internet back then makes me wonder if we're now screwed out of the future innovation that might happen because our big 2, Google and Facebook, may be too big to fail (or at least fall), at least for a while.
" In a separate announcement, GeoCities posted a net loss of $8.4 million, or 27 cents a share, for the fourth quarter ended, compared with losses of $3 million, or 14 cents a share in the year-ago period. Revenue for the three month period rose 341 percent to $7.5 million. For the year, the company lost $19.8 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $8.9 million, or 44 cents a share, in 1997. "
and bought for $3.57 billion... With 19 million unique visitors per month, or 228 million per year, you'd need to generate revenue of $15 from each of those _visitors_ on average to just return the investment... (not accounting for the losses)
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's... That said, hindsight is always so 20:20.
Ah Instagram, Facebook, twitter, tumblr... You really think that all the google ads you've seen in your life (let alone on a given site) add up to a return of $15? I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad.
This space can be lucrative, but every success is over the bodies of many failed companies. This phase we're in now is equally silly.
> I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad.
I really wish this was a more common attitude.
You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double.
Imagine you pay $5 for every 10,000 page views on previously adverted sites and the money was distributed among those websites you visited.
I don't understand why ad-driven companies don't offer an option for premium. I would lobby hard for Facebook if I could pay to preserve my privacy and not see ads.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadThere's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
I think the Google streaming service utilizes Google's ability to personalize tastes pretty well. At least, so far, it's exceeded my Spotify and Rdio experiences.
But that being said, I do have my music collection on Google Play Music and listen from there, so Google had a head start already.
.. it was poorly managed and basically left to die. Then almost a decade later it was recreated again by another company (Tumblr).
In fairness; regardless of what Yahoo! did with Geocities, they'd still end up buying Tumblr.
Start Tumblr-style side venture. Pitch it to existing Geocities customers in various ways with advantages like shared logins and some semblance of import tool easing adoption. Let Tumblr roll on from that kick start. Eventually phase out or shut-down Geocities.
Different era. Different CEO. Different corporate culture. Different demography. Different way people use the internet. Vastly different size of users.
Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much money.
I personally want tech industry to get away from 2-3 companies dominating. I want a new challenger, that could be yahoo (we don't know yet), but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt; and a chance to prove themselves under new leadership.
Geocities in 1999 -- spawned the dot com rush
Flickr (2005) -- the official web 2.0 start date!
Tumblr (2013) -- ???
As a portal it failed because the basic concepts of free accounts and uploading made it a haven for spammers, as a commercial concept it failed because bulk display advertising rates dropped through the floor during the .com bust and in spite of losing money Yahoo kept it running for many years.
To 'fix' geocities would have meant grandfathering in a few million accounts, re-inventing the service in a way that would make it profitable against the rise of the new homepage provider: facebook.
I personally don't think that is something that they could have done, not with Yahoo's image and the legacy they were still hauling along. It needed a clean break with the past and ditching Geocities gave Yahoo an opportunity to do just that (which they then subsequently mostly wasted).
Yahoo did the right thing, but they went about it in a terribly callous way. All they had to do was to deny google crawling access to geocities, freeze the uploads, allow account archival and deletion in an automated way (easy for them to do). That way we wouldn't have this gaping hole in the web today, and we wouldn't have desperate people trying to find their old stuff through whatever means possible.
I'm sure 1 fte and a few hundred bucks worth of bandwidth would have been a price worth paying for Yahoo given the dent it gave their image, it definitely was worth paying that much to me to try to keep it running.
I really don't want Tumblr to be bought by Yahoo!
Last time a startup went in and was killed. Rumour has it that they halt the progress of things till it's no longer relevant to the real world and then kill it.
I know it'll never happen, but it's just funny to think, given their current trend for acqui-hires.
They sound like great places to work.
I say "effectively", because the many mergers and splits it went through in the 00s meant the large parts nationalise in the Netherland and the UK were not identical to what it was in '99 when this analyst was interviewed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-s...
Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.
1. It was auto-deleted after a period of inactivity,
2. The Wayback Machine doesn’t know about it, and
3. My local copy was deleted by Microsoft thanks to a bug in Windows. (I was moving a folder across my home network from my old Windows 98SE computer to an XP box, and when the move operation encountered a folder with an accented character in its name, the entire operation failed — and deleted all of the data that was to be moved.)
Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is an act of war. :O!
As long as no one ever sees it/knows it was me who made what was quite possibly the ugliest website in the world, all I'll have is fond memories.
Have you got any of the $3.6 billion left ?
I made a Limp bizkit fan site over several lunch times in high school.
I don't know what is more embarrassing, being a limpbizkit fan or using lunch breaks to create websites...
try amazon.com :)
[1] http://www.reocities.com/neighborhoods/
By the way, thanks for posting. It's always nice to hear from people who were there at the time.
In 1997, Yahoo turned down the offer to acquire Google for $1,000,000.
That was not a good call. I wonder how many other missed opportunities those $3.8B had.
and bought for $3.57 billion... With 19 million unique visitors per month, or 228 million per year, you'd need to generate revenue of $15 from each of those _visitors_ on average to just return the investment... (not accounting for the losses)
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's... That said, hindsight is always so 20:20.
Seems SV still has the same economic sense.
This space can be lucrative, but every success is over the bodies of many failed companies. This phase we're in now is equally silly.
I really wish this was a more common attitude.
You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double.
Imagine you pay $5 for every 10,000 page views on previously adverted sites and the money was distributed among those websites you visited.