The Four Big Mistakes Businesses Are Making On The Internet
When the Dot Com Bust occurred, people like Warren Buffet, Chairman of Berkshire-Hathaway, came off looking smart. “I never invest in anything I don’t understand,” Buffet explained to a snickering investment world. That investment world that lost billions on the Dot Com feeding frenzy found out the older man knew what he was talking about. He’s taking his billions and giving them to Bill and Melinda Gates for charitable impact.
The rest of us must deal with the realities of not having billions of dollars.
That reality is rooted in what Steve Martin noted in his 1978 movie, The Jerk, “Ahhhh… it’s a profit thing….” And that profit thing is centered around your website. If your business is not measuring marketing success by website visitors, you had better wake up fast.
What was missing with the Dot Com Bust now exists? Look at what Rupert Murdoch, king of all media and Chairman of the Board of Newscorp, said in their annual shareholder’s meeting last October.
“The media industry is one that, in my more than 50 years working in it, has evolved in ways people could never have imagined. With that in mind, and at a time when our financial position is stronger than ever, we have turned our attention in recent months back to the Internet. It is an area of the media industry we can’t ignore and has become our most significant single area of focus over the past year.
Why the urgency? Because the Internet is the fastest-growing advertising market it has the fastest-growing audience. More importantly, broadband proliferation is at last real, meaning the opportunity is now to exponentially grow the distribution of our vast video content in news, sports, and general entertainment.”
What Mr. Murdoch was saying is this, “What we thought was there then (the Dot Com Bust) is there now (connectivity). During the last seven years, something powerful has occurred on the Internet – it has grown a back half. Search Engines took off when businesses recognized that the pre-Dot Com assessment of the Internet as cyber real estate was unfounded. Cyber techno geniuses found out the hard way that the Internet was not about location, location, location. Today, do you think Yahoo would pay Mark Cuban another $5.7 billion for his Broadcast Dot Com site today? Maybe $5.7 million, but nowhere near $5.7 billion. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch has recognized publicly that the future of all media now sits on the Internet by paying $580 million cash for a two-year-old website, Myspace, that had not even seen $20 million in gross revenues in its entire existence. Why?
