An Editorial by Dacques Viker

The internet is dead!

Almost every well known hot-shot dot com company has either gone bankrupt or saw their market value drop by more than 90% in the past several years. The internet surely must be dead! The media coverage of these sensational market failures has soured the internet to many serious users. With so much failure, there must be something wrong with the internet. When you look at the underlying factors that have caused so much bad press, you would actually see that these failures were based on several flaws in the business models of those who failed on the internet. You can draw only one conclusion; the internet is not dead!

To understand why this is the case, you have to ask yourself several questions. "Why all the bad press?", "Why were there so many failed companies on the internet?", and "Is the internet still a viable medium?" The answers to these questions are right at your fingertips.

Why all the bad press?

The media loves a great success story and they love a great failure. The key word here is great! If mybusiness.com loses $10,000 in a year, it might be a great loss for the owner, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't even make a blip on the business radar screen. However, if mybusiness.com loses $100,000,000 in a year, the media has a great desire to make this big news. In America, we like everything big; Big cars, Big Gulps, Big Burgers, big victories, big gains... and big losses.

After the dot bomb fallout, what was left standing? Several large, competent companies and numerous small companies. Included in those still around are the profitable porn sites. With the exception of "Real Sex" on HBO, the media generally ignores this sector of the internet.

The truth is that many people are making money on the internet. Are they becoming millionaires from it? Probably not. In most cases, they are only making enough to supplement their regular income. This is not big news; therefore the media doesn't care to mention it. I don't blame them.

Why were there so many failed companies on the internet?

This can be answered in one word: stupidity!

"Hey, have you heard of the hot new dot com? They have a market cap of $4 billion. Sure their sales were only $12 million and their losses were $700 million. But, hey, they are hot!"

How are they hot? What moron authorized $700 million in expenditures and could only generate $12 million in revenues? It was probably the same moron that now has to sell his ten-million dollar house.

Thankfully, the days of hearing these stories are over and sanity is prevailing. The sane internet involves good business models and many small companies that can fill the voids left by the failed companies. Sanity prevails in the fact that not everything has to be sold via the internet. When you look at the sites with the most hits on the internet, a very high percent of them have one thing in common; they provide information!

Is the internet still a viable medium?

Of course, it is. The internet works because it is the largest source of information in the world!

What do you want to know? Look it up on the internet. There is so much information available on the internet and so many options to obtain this information that the Internet Age makes the information age look like the Stone Age. More and more people access the internet every day. The growth of the internet slowed over the past few years but this reduction in growth is due largely to the saturation which was inevitable.

The internet is far from dead. In fact, now that the frantic ballyhoo and the greedy morons are out of the picture, the internet is flourishing in what it does best - provide resources and information.