Web Prophecy: 10 Years Later

What was right, what was wrong?

The rise and fall of high-tech stocks. Bush v. Gore. And just a few months off...Dubya’s brush-clearing and a little thing called 9/11. The year 2000 seems like ages ago. In Internet time it’s ancient history.

Yet so much from then is relatively the same. In the autumn of 2000 I attended a “Publishing on the Web” seminar then put on by Stanford University (now organized by Yale University) amid widespread loss of faith in the Internet after years of high-tech stock overvaluation. Predictions about the future of the online realm thundered from the podium – a few dire, but nearly all optimistic. As I pore over my tattered notes a decade later, it seems the "POtW" crowd was pretty prescient on the whole.

So, what was right? And what was wrong? Ten years down the line, here’s a rundown.

What Was Right

More portable/mobile devices. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said it best in the summer of 2009: “The smartphone market is really in its infancy. We’ll look back in five years and say, whoa, this is a market that’s tripled or quadrupled.” A prediction in MIN has said mobile will overtake web in three years – 2013.

The Internet will be “always on.” Say what? Of course the Internet is “always on.” But it sure didn’t feel that way back in 2000, when only 5% of the Internet audience had DSL/high-speed while the other 95% of us listened daily to the dial-up symphony: "Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do….beeeeeeeeeeep……screeeeeeeech….”

There will be more attitude, more opinion. This prediction has come true in spades, in the mainstream media and especially online, where social networks and the blogosphere have become veritable Towers of Babel.

There will be more talking to each other, through chat and email. I have only four words of response: “Face” and “Book” and “Linked” and “In.”

More engagement through audio and video. Two more words: “You” and “Tube.”

Newspapers will be in deep trouble with the next generation. According to the April 2000 edition of Online Journalism Review, fifty-nine percent of 18- to 24-year-olds then preferred the Internet. Most newspapers probably would kill for that ratio today. Today’s college-aged kids almost certainly like paper even less – an 80/20, or even 90/10, split in favor of online is certainly likely. See a previous blog post about this very topic.

“Leads are e-commerce.” Amen. Ten years down the road, many b2b media companies are still just catching on to their brands’ value in lead generation – arguably the biggest thing they have going for them – while more advertisers appreciate inbound traffic and requests for more information as worth their weight in gold. 

“Click-through rate is only one measure of performance. It’s not the number of clicks – it’s who clicks, and what they do post-click.” Exactly! Yet here we are, a decade older and still laboring to convince so many advertisers that by clicks alone shall an online ad campaign not be measured. The Online Publishers Association talks about the 80/20 rule: 20% of web users account for 80% of clicks, and most of those clickers are disproportionately younger and lower-income. Furthermore, as Publishing Executive has pointed out in talking about “delayed” clicks, the road to an advertiser’s website is not always direct.

“Keep an eye on Amazon.com – they’re the most aggressive in updating their site to customer needs.” With a market valuation exceeding all brick-and-mortar retailers but Walmart, I’d say Amazon has succeeded.

What Was Wrong

“The amount of free content will flatten or decrease in the next few years. We have to figure out a way to get subscribers to pay.” Unfortunately for all of us in media outside of a handful of outfits like the Wall Street Journal, this sadly has not been the case. Heck, even the release of the iPad has not significantly goosed paid subscriptions. Can anyone explain to me why USA Today would choose to offer its iPad app for absolutely free? If I had a paid print subscription to “USA Hooray” I’d cancel it this very moment – not in favor of an iPad app necessarily, but in protest of the newspaper’s stupidity. If a consumer publication is not going to get its audience to pay for content now, while tablet computers are fresh and new, it never will.

Getting Internet advertisers to pay 20-30 times more for audio lead-in ads than for banners. This initial burst of largesse among advertisers probably was due as much as anything to novelty and an early infatuation with multimedia. Today many video/audio ads are fighting for the same CPMs as banner ads, maybe a few magnitudes higher if they can get it. And besides, who outside of radio outfits like NPR focus on “audio” alone when video generally can ride right alongside it? 

“No one has ever stolen a credit card number on the Internet.” Ah, how we can now long for such Internet utopianism! A mere 18 or so months after the conference, the New York Times ran a headline reading: “Credit Card Theft is Thriving Online as Global Market.”

“Web access is very expensive in Japan.” Japan!! Listen, we’d all move to Japan in a heartbeat if web access were our sole criteria for residency. At $26 per month, Japan now has the lowest price for DSL service. The U.S., by contrast, ranks #13 in average price per connection, according to DSL Reports. Which only goes to show that "we can send a man to the moon, but…”