| Product: |
The future of the .com industry |
| Date: |
27/07/01 (35 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: Can easily be turned around, The best invention for the past 500 years or sommat like that.
Disadvantages: Based on ideas of marketing that were, let's be honest, really stupid.
No, dooyoo, the title isn't a trick, it's not a ploy to get more miles, it's me trying to show the dooyoosers something.
Ok Dooyoosers, well, those of you who were attracted to my op by it's somewhat misleading title, you have just participated in my little demonstration.
The few actions you just took demonstrate exactly what the basis of the dot com industry is. The internet is a whole other world, you can even sense that sometimes. A new world built on information, with a strong community spirit, sub-cultures, rituals and even crime. The internet also has an industry, the .com industry.
The currency of the .com is not pounds, dollars or goats.. It's not Beenz or ipoint, it's not Kbps or ms. Strangely enough, the currency of the .com isn't even dooyoo miles (shocked gasp). The most important currency to all .com companies is hits. Bang bang bang. If your page is shifting data to a million users a minute then you can't help but make money.
How do you make money out of these hits? You sell them for real-world currency. Through advertising. People will pay you to advertise on your site, because you get lots of hits. Their advertisement will then attract them lots of hits, which they can sell on. Amounts of hits grow bigger and bigger and so do the steamy piles of cash.
This is the very bedrock on which .com land is constructed.
Trouble is, somewhere along the line, the money that you're PAYING (or receiving, maybe) for these hits has to come from somewhere. Hopefully from the "hitters", the mindless browsers trudging through the swamp of advertising. The idea is that these people will eventually, after about an hour of clicking on adverts, buy something, and then the money will enter the .com industry.
Truth is, people are starting to realise, that the money that has been forked out for hits is not being compensated for in actual physical sales.
What that
means is, the .com industry realised that they were passing hits and money back and forth between each other and it was slowly leaking out rather than making any.
The internet as it is today is built purely on information, and some people want you to see *their* information (on how to buy the one-off special offer nose enlarger for only $9.95 plus shipping) and they are willing to fork out large hefty wads of cash for the privelige of you visiting their site.
Trouble is, though, they're not making enough money from the hits to pay for them. Let's use an example shall we?
Gridget.Com is an online shop that sells sprogs. Sprogs cost £15 each (£4 of which is profit) and they sell them online with free delivery. So, they go to Skarp.com, a chat site where a lot of people discuss sprogs, and advertise. For each hit, Gridget will pay Skarp £0.10, and does so happily. Now, out of every 100 visitors, only 2 will buy a sprog, so that's £8 profit out of (100*10) £10 worth of hits. That just cost them £2, but they don't care, they don't think about that.. they just see 100 hits! yay!
That's a very basic and probably unrealistic example. (Couldn't you tell?)
I have had the internet for about 3-4 years. I have clicked on hundreds of (clean, decent) banner adverts, and only ever bought a few items of clothes online, which were not following a click-thru.
There is no money going into the .com industry from consumers, therefore it cannot and will not survive in it's current state.
We can change that however, we can make it better. Throw the policing the internet idea out the window and bring back ideals such as "Freeware", "Open Source" and "File Sharing". Stick a few fancy graphics on the front and people will be flocking back online, they may even pay for the privelige.
The only way that real money can be made out of .com is (not through presenting old
products in a new way) through providing new .com services alongside existing products, don't make people pay so much for trivial things, because they won't, and then it'll probably collapse.
A lot of people think that the .com industry is a paint-by-numbers way to build your own million dollar empire overnight, and that's why there are so many crap websites out there. It takes true ingenuity these days to set up and run a decent website, and it would be a work of pure genius to make money from it.
My suggestion for the .com industry:
Step 1: stop calling it the .com industry and start calling it the .com playground.
Step 2: charge for nothing but physical products online, pay for services in kind.
Step 3: stop trying to make any money out of a website, if you do make some, well done, but that's not the point.
Step 4: browsers need to get their acts together, this is supposed to be a worldwide village innit? Not much use if some of us can't see the local pub properly, and others are locked inside our houses because they're too old, plus we're all speaking different languages. Some village.
Step 5: hire me. I know some HTML and stuff, and I've got more ideas than 50% of the population of Taiwan put together ever had in their lives, and the Taiwanese are a thoughtful people.
well, thassit. Not a very good op I guess, bit here and there, but it should still be useful to yous out there.
Night night.
<(-_-)>
Jack.
Summary:
|
Last comment:
 |
JackW24 - 28/07/01 I should be employed, but you won't know that till you see mine and Melanie's (jackstiger) site. But it's still not finished. :) |
View all
5
comments
|
