What went wrong?

[Gary]

With all the dot coms going out of business over the last year, anyone have any thoughts on why they all failed and more are still tumbling? Is it just that people will only buy porn on the net and nothing else? Poor business models? Advertising during the super bowl?

I personally think there were too many ego's being fed. They typically would get huge amounts of funding, then spend it on lavish offices, huge staff, in house arcades, etc...

[Wizzo]

They didn't have enough naked pictures....

[Amputate Your Head]

Originally posted by Gary:
I personally think there were too many ego's being fed. They typically would get huge amounts of funding, then spend it on lavish offices, huge staff, in house arcades, etc...

Bingo.

[Lane]

[Wizzo]

They didn't ALL fail, just the one with poor business skills or poor business models...

There are some that have managed to survive and that's what happens with any industry...

In the early 1900s there were hundreds of car makers, now there's a handful, but they produce wayyyy more cars than when there were hundreds of em...

------------------
Don't Fuck Yourself, get paid 71%...
JOIN CASHTOUR

[Gary]

good point wizzo

But what about amazon.com. They amaze me, last i heard they were still loosing money and with their registered customer base alone they should be one of the more successful companies. Maybe they should start spamming their mailling list with porn ads.

[Blondy]

Most were scams

------------------
************************
Private Label Resources: A great source for marketing adult sites.

PLR Radio: High volume exposure.

[X37375787]

This discussion is way beyond my intellectual horizon.

[Tucks]

> But what about amazon.com
>

Not to mention all the press they've received. Thousands upon thousands of articles offering free exposure to the point that just about every consumer in the country knows their name and business, and they still can't turn a profit. It's a joke.

[Corpsie]

Just like Fretter and Highland appliance, they expanded too rapidly. There was also HQ (I think) which was trying to compete with every other huge home improvement stores.



Then there are the people that went out of business because they didn't expand enough and lost business.

[Steve]

Well, at least the Buy.com tv commercials made me laugh.

Only Mike's Hard Lemonade comes close to their old ads.

[Wilber]

Its been more like 2½ years of dot.bombs.

They are still dropping like flys.

fuckedcompany.com has a great site with the latest info and
faqs on dot.bombs. Pud runs it and he has quite a following.

The adult industry has _not_ been immune to this crunch. Who
has really been making money (steadily) is the pipe providers
and phone companies.

[Lensman]

They went under because Microsoft lost the anutitrust case, that day the tech stock market crashed and the tumble spared no one. The last one's up (dot coms) where the first ones down.

[eroswebmaster]

While I am new to the porn biz I am not new to "e-commerce."

I have been selling online for awhile now on online auction sites.

It is my opinion that one of the main reasons for most of the dot com failures is that not every surfer was ready to pop out their cc and buy something online due to the fear of being ripped off etc.

The porn industry had a lot to do with creating that fear as well as the online auction industry with it's scammers. I should qualify that remark because I am not speaking of honest webmasters but those who have decided to take short cuts and exploit their customer base instead of building up customer confidence and winning them over that way.

Some of that exploitation came in the form of dialers. Things have changed considerably but as we all know in the beginning people left and right were downloading these programs and not knowing that they were being disconnected from the net and logging onto some isp in a foreign country until they got a whopping telephone bill.

Then throw in the trouble it takes to get some of the payment processors to cancel accounts without rebilling you for a couple of months after...not to mention companies who have had their customer database hacked along with the customers cc#'s.

This is what makes the news. News items like someone ripping off a bunch of ebay buyers gets more viewers to their program than the fact that there are thousands of honest business people on the net.

That in my opinion created a weary puplic. I also think that it was all too much too soon. There was no way the market could continue to grow as it was and of course there was a bust.

I think though over the next 10 years we will finally see "real" growth in traffic on the net. As more people come online and learn that it's not the dangerous anarchist party everyone makes it out to be, and/or learn how to protect themselves from being scammed they will be more willing to whip out the old cc and purchase something.

eros

[Theo]

Originally posted by Tucks:
> But what about amazon.com
>

Not to mention all the press they've received. Thousands upon thousands of articles offering free exposure to the point that just about every consumer in the country knows their name and business, and they still can't turn a profit. It's a joke.

at this point of time if i'm right with the drastic changes J.Bezos did in amazon.com the business makes profit.

[Keev]

Its a natural business cycle survival of the fittest!


Besides amazon could have saved about 25 million its first year in advertising if it would have just paid and bought books.com alot easier to amrket and brand it than amazon.com

There business models are either screwed up or people sell things or services that people are generally not willing to buy online but rather read up for the information only.

[Blondy]

book.com would have made more sense

------------------
************************
Private Label Resources: A great source for marketing adult sites.

PLR Radio: High volume exposure.

[Rivux]

So many things went wrong, I could write a book about it. Unfortunately I was a casuality of the dot com bust as the internet incubator i was working for cut 90% of staff 2 months ago.

Many of the problems were management that came from traditional companies trying to make it in the internet world and not understanding who their customers were. Not understanding the mentality of the surfer. As well there was a lot of over spending because you have to remember that in nearly every case, the owners weren't spending their money, they were spending some VCs.

As well, people were to slow to change once things starting going bad, they were living in a dream world thinking that everything would be ok. Then when they figured out that things werent going to be ok, most made bad decisions.

But I think the largest cause of all was that people that were in net craze, thought that the internet was the beginning and ending of life. Not realizing that a very small portion of people were willing to buy a house or a lawnmoyer online. For the most part, we as a society just were not ready to move all of our purchases online. Its tough sometimes to realize how insignificant the internet is to a lot of people when you spend your whole day engrossed in it.

So I would have to say that the problem was less the technology, and less the management and mostly the mentality of the consumer.