| "Predicting the Future by Looking to the Past" by Michael Coyle
The early days of radio are similar in many ways to today’s World Wide Web. In the early twenties, it wasn’t uncommon for a farmer to build a small transmitter in his barn and start broadcasting. “The Smith’s had a baby boy. Henderson has a heifer for sale, and now my daughter will sing a hymn”. Folks would stop by to play a little fiddle or talk about the season’s crops. In the big cities, they may have broadcast a ball game, barber shop quartet, or simply read a book.
Those early broadcasters, small as they were, still had expenses - tubes for the transmitters, microphones, wiring, and electricity. To help pay the bills, they looked for advertisers. The local ball game could be sponsored by the hardware store owner. Maybe some poetry would be read thanks to a few dollars from the dress shop.
Browsing web pages on the internet today is eerily similar. Everybody seems to be putting up a site, but just like the farmers from 60 years ago, most of the sites eventually go “404, Document not found”. Webmasters that continue updating their content soon realize the amount of work involved, and while they may be willing to do it without personal monetary compensation, there are still expenses.
As some point, usually around one thousand visitors per day, a webmaster gets a call from his friendly Internet Service Provider saying the site has exceeded its allowed bandwidth and expenses are about to increase dramatically. Time to look for some sponsors!
Like early radio, advertising content is closely related to the content of the web page. Stop by weather.com for the forecast in Detroit, and the page’s banner will plead for you to “Say Yes to Michigan for Your Next Vacation!”. A visit to The iMac.com will produce more bondi banners that you can shake a round mouse at!
The future though is likely to be very different. While the cost of browsing the net for the average reader falls, the cost of serving those pages is rising. When the radio industry found itself in the same predicament, consolidation began to take place. Groups of stations in a local region would share the cost of creating content. They pooled their marketing and advertising efforts to keep costs low, give greater service to sponsors, and provide a wider audience of listeners.
Westinghouse, RCA and RKO built huge networks of stations that covered the country from coast to coast. A concert broadcast live in New York would also be heard in Los Angeles.
Later in the 1950’s, the same consolidation took place in the television industry. For decades the cost of serving content was so high that there were only three nationwide networks!
Web sites are beginning to go through the same consolidating. The popular Linux site Slashdot has been purchased by VA Research, MacCentral joins ZDNet. Even ResExcellence has an association with The MacDaily Network allows over a dozen Macintosh sites of various sizes to pool their resources and look attractive to sponsors.
If Internet Service Providers continue to shift the burden of their expenses from web readers to content providers, we may see a pricing structure that more closely resembles Cable TV. You can receive a dozen or so of the big web portals for your normal access fee, but if you want the more specialized content of popular smaller sites, expect to pay extra.
In the end, the internet continue to mirror the radio industry, where in the major cities you have dozens of AM/FM stations, but only five preset buttons on the car stereo.
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