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The dotcom bubble: 10 years on
March 10, 2010
Today is the tenth anniversary of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, so I though it would be interesting to see how the Internet landscape has changed over the last decade. Below is a list of the top 20 websites in the UK last week, with Google and Facebook topping the list. Back in the heyday of the dotcom bubble, Facebook wasn’t even a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and Google was still in its infancy.
However, a number of the sites that were big back then remain so today: Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) and Yahoo! Mail still rank in the top 20, and both Microsoft and Yahoo! have other popular UK sites as well. eBay and Amazon remain the most visited retail websites in the UK, although they now face much stiffer competition from both online and multichannel retailers now.
But what about some of the names most closely associated with dotcom boom and bust?
Lastminute.com – one of the great survivors of the bubble; still a top 20 UK travel site.
Boo.com – given the success of fashion retailers like ASOS, which makes such good use of multimedia on its site, maybe the doomed clothing retailer was simply ahead of its time and would have survived in a broadband world?
Broadcast.com – the likes of Last.fm, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, Hulu and YouTube have proved that streaming media can be a success, but they all would have struggled over a dial up connection.
Which of today’s most popular sites do you think will still be widely used in ten years time, and which are likely to fall by the wayside?
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Posted by Robin Goad at 03:45 PM
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In Categories BBC | Economy | Google | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | TV | Travel | Video
Social media has definitely been the big winner over the past 10 years. Whereas most companies during the .com boom, take somebody like boo.com, were out to make huge wealth from simply selling products, the great success stories today, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia are all financed through advertising and donations.
Monetising on the web has changed significantly. Conservatism is the name of the game in ecommerce. People aren't just blindly investing in ideas that will never get off the ground (again, reference Boo.com). Facebook and Twitter created a groundswell of interest before the big backers came in to send them global.
I wonder how different it will be in another 10 years though? Google and Microsoft look secure, barring a massive change in public opinion, so too is Facebook. The lessons of the dotcom bubble bursting have been learnt now.
Yahoo and their various properties are the most likely to disappear. With Microsoft joining forces with them, I can see the brand losing significance in time and being subject to a takeover.
Posted by Steve Logan | March 10, 2010 05:16 PM