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When I got started with meetnewplayers.com it was 1997.
The Internet was going to be the next big thing and we were all going to be
millionaires. It was the original
internet “land grab”. People
were registering domain names, even Hotmail email addresses thinking they
would be able to cash out in a few years.
I was certain that everything was moving online. It was
true; it just took 10 years to get there. Like most Internet entrepreneurs who has survived
over the years I have gone through a few stages now: …I am sure
most successful entrepreneurs would recognize the steps:
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Unbridled Optimism
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Reality Strikes - Despair arrives
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With no options but moving forward you get a grim
determination to finish what you started
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Now that you have invested everything you have nothing left to lose and don't fear the future
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Overnight success
This website was started at "The Bean" an Internet cafe
at Young and Eglinton in Toronto, Canada. I was a
musician who was looking to tour with a band but after surfing the local
classifieds I found that there were no real opportunities. I started
a "fax-back" service; you could call a number and get a fax
report of musicians in your area. Not bad for a Windows 3.1 machine
and kind of fun.
| There was this new thing called the Internet,
so I built this page and spent a
few hundred dollars advertising in the local arts magazine to get things
rolling. At the time it was a static HTML page; someone would
send an email and I would add their listing manually. At the time
not that many people had even seen the Internet yet, and musicians are
consistently late adopters; we simply can't afford new equipment. |
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I then registered meetnewplayers.com and used shared
hosting with a company called 9Net Ave that I found in a Wired magazine. I had been updating the site from an internet café, the
FrontPage98 was cool and brought some nice added features. After
awhile I went big and bought a Windows 2000 server on the day Windows 2K
was released. OK, now I have
a server. How much is it for
hosting? Oh… 4K setup and
300 US$ a month. Ouch. OK then…
At the time I was going for a combination of
advertising and paid memberships; a road most of us content providers have
gone down before. But with the advent of HotMail all the rules
changed. You had to deliver a service that was great AND free for
you to be considered a viable option. But this is a tough nut to
crack. How do you provide a great service, for free and still get
paid when there are no advertising $$$ to support you?
Short answer? You do it for free; on spec or go
bankrupt.
How do you survive? Deep pockets or
do-it-yourself.
In the year 2007 it is possible to make a few
pennies with a decent website; but "back in the day" there was lots of
potential, just not enough cheques. Not enough people were online to
make it interesting for marketers to pay a reasonable price for you
advertising inventory.
But for us publishers this was the opportunity.
One the Internet the cost per additional page is negligible; unlike newspapers; which must be
printed, delivered and recycled or disposed of. We had lots of
inventory, just no buyers.
Read more... The
origins of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
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