Video is undeniably where search was in 2000, that is: a major part of the online ecosystem but desperately looking for a business model.
Back in search, many of the original search companies had thrown in the towel and repositioned on being a portal, these include AltaVista, of note. But even companies like Yahoo! - the largest portal already - was not convinced of the virtues of search. Yahoo!’s own search technology was only launched in 2004. Yep, 2004! MSN’s Live was launched the next year, in 2005… that’s pretty wild.
LUCKY 13TH: GOOGLE
Ultimately, it’s interesting to note that the company that is now synonymous with search, Google, was nowhere near the first one around, when it comes to search engines, according to Wikipedia’s list, they were 13th… of course, this excludes meta search engines, Dogpile, Metacrawler and Mamma, I worked at Mamma in 2000, for example, and it was around since 1996. Anyway, even when ranked by search engines alone, Google had 12 - count ‘em 12 search engines launch before it did:
That’s pretty wild. Forget “it’s not the first to market but the first to scale”, I think indeed it’s “don’t build a business until the business model is developed”.
Today search garners 40% of online ad revenues, and in Q3 of 2007, Google did 40% of all US revenues in online ads put together. Of course, Google was an anomaly, it owns the most profitable space in the highest growth media because its timing was perfect (luck and externalities) but because the market crash of 2000 made everyone else pull back.
That being said, search really only took off in 2001, a look at historical search revenues shows:
When you consider video advertising projections, you wonder, is video where search was in 2000?
Also good tidbits on Wikipedia and Search Engine Watch.
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