Posted On: Friday - March 31st 2023 6:00PM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites
After writing yesterday's post on web search sites over the years, I was trying to find a graph of the increase in the number of pages on the web, that is separate html, asp, php, whatever files. That's by no means the only measure of growth of the www.
My metric would be be better than the simple # of sites, as amazon would only count as 1 for the former count, while there a probably millions of different pages that can be viewed (either as flat html pages or as put together by the server-side software like asp, etc.) However, those 2 measures tell us what's out there to look at but not what information people are getting, with viewing it being yet another matter.
One could go by # of bytes sent across the
There are the other standard stats that are kept up with, such as number of site visits per time, number of visitors per time, and then, number of unique visitors over a given duration.* Peak Stupidity gets those from our hosting company.
It's the first one, number of visits, in his case, per month, that we can watch on the great video HERE.
The site I linked to does have some interesting writing too, but the video is below:
This video is great for showing who was who from 1993 to 2022, almost 30 years. One must remember that the horizontal scale is continually getting larger. Sites may show relative decline - the bars will shrink - yet the are still growing in number of monthly visits. I thought about it, and this was probably the best way to do it, with that huge growth. Engineers would suggest a log scale, but most people wouldn't get that. If you kept the same linear scale, you'd see tee-tiny bars on the left for a couple of decades.
Enjoy this cool graphical history of the top sites over time!
Oh, I'd suggest keeping the sound turned off. I didn't like the music. It's not at all necessary.
PS: Most of the various stats on internet size don't take into account intranets. Many companies have thousands to millions of pages for their employees to browse. Without giving access, they wouldn't be hit by the web crawlers, and those company's servers would not provide stats. (Maybe on total bytes sent around via the ISP somewhere?)
* This latter one is not quite like a rate. 10 unique visitors in a month doesn't equate to 120 unique visitors a year.
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[UPDATED - late 03/31:] The same video is now embedded here , from Adam Smith's own youtube channel. And no sound too! Thanks again!
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Comments:
Moderator
Monday - April 3rd 2023 10:08AM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, "The Office" is extremely funny to me, still - partly because I haven't watched re-runs in nearly a decade, so it's a little fresher. I could picture Kevin's expression as I read your line that was a joke in that time. You are right that it wouldn't work now.
I hope you do write this into a post on your site. We are both not in our "wheelhouses", so to speak, but you are more than I am.
As for Mr. Smith's channel he has had 37 views of this, as of 2 days back. Now that I know the counter is not real time, it won't be as easy, but I want to see if it registers views on this site too. I think I'll do 10 or so one day, later on, and keep up to see if it caught them.
I hope you do write this into a post on your site. We are both not in our "wheelhouses", so to speak, but you are more than I am.
As for Mr. Smith's channel he has had 37 views of this, as of 2 days back. Now that I know the counter is not real time, it won't be as easy, but I want to see if it registers views on this site too. I think I'll do 10 or so one day, later on, and keep up to see if it caught them.
Moderator
Monday - April 3rd 2023 9:55AM MST
PS: Ahhh! I screwed up again, Mr. Hail, because I only caught that 1st peak. That was in May of '00, so Spring, at just a hair below 600 million visits/month and went on down toward a low of just over 400 million the next month, only getting back to that local high from May '00 by August '02. I really wonder about that data, such as the over 30% drop from May-June of '00. Did something big happen with the company then?
Yes, the number really plateaud for the whole year of '05, at 1.012 billion v/mo. +/- 0.001 That's fishy too. Did they not report the number for the year? I didn't take enough time to continue watching after I saw that first peak.
Yes, the number really plateaud for the whole year of '05, at 1.012 billion v/mo. +/- 0.001 That's fishy too. Did they not report the number for the year? I didn't take enough time to continue watching after I saw that first peak.
Hail
Monday - April 3rd 2023 9:30AM MST
PS
Another way to give a data-based estimate of the AOL peak might be base on its absolute-visit doubling time looking for the years when doubling time was fastest.
Jan 1993 to Oct 1995: 21-month doubling time
Oct 1995 to Jun 1996: 8-month doubling time
Jun 1996 to Jun 1997: 12-month doubling time
Jun 1997 to May 1999: 23-month doubling time
May 1999 to Oct 2002: 41-month doubling time
--- 1996/97 is AOL's peak, per this absolute-visit doubling time metric, which by its nature is necessarily early-leaning.
--- The mid-1990s to early-2000s is the broader peak, bounded by when AOL was achieving its absolute-visit doublings. The long-peak definitely ends in the early 2000s, by this metric, because AOL failed to complete another doubling, after fall 2002, despite huge growth in "the Internet" ongoing all through these years.
(another Internet reminder from the Peak Stupidity-approved tv show The Office: as late as ca.2009, The Office has its big-fat-dumb-guy character, Kevin, awkwardly ask a woman he was interested in, "So, are you on...email?" I recall commenting on this before here at Peak Stupidity, but that joke could only work "for what it was" within a certain window of time; it would not have been a joke at all in the 1990s. It would have been too ridiculous by the 2010s. It needed to be a normal question plus x years to fit the big-fat-dumb-guy character.)
Revisiting the relative rankings, which I focused on in my original mega-comment on observations on the Adam Smith video (perhaps to later be adapted to a full post at HailToYou.wordpress.com as suggested), I had this:
"In about February 2003, AOL fades to fourth, displaced by Google. AOL will not recover."
That was my final mention of AOL in the mega-comment.
And now we see that the AOL absolute-visit peak lasts most of 2005. A strict application of the numbers would have AOL still at its peak as late as fall 2005, even winter 2005-06 or spring 2006 to stretch the absolute peak/plateau.
We are left with a variety of data-based "AOL peak" estimates falling in a wide window ranging from 1997 to 2005/06!
.
Thanks for tolerating my long comments ---- will check back in tomorrow, and curious what PRC-China Internet wisdom you have in store, as you hinted in the following comment-section.
Another way to give a data-based estimate of the AOL peak might be base on its absolute-visit doubling time looking for the years when doubling time was fastest.
Jan 1993 to Oct 1995: 21-month doubling time
Oct 1995 to Jun 1996: 8-month doubling time
Jun 1996 to Jun 1997: 12-month doubling time
Jun 1997 to May 1999: 23-month doubling time
May 1999 to Oct 2002: 41-month doubling time
--- 1996/97 is AOL's peak, per this absolute-visit doubling time metric, which by its nature is necessarily early-leaning.
--- The mid-1990s to early-2000s is the broader peak, bounded by when AOL was achieving its absolute-visit doublings. The long-peak definitely ends in the early 2000s, by this metric, because AOL failed to complete another doubling, after fall 2002, despite huge growth in "the Internet" ongoing all through these years.
(another Internet reminder from the Peak Stupidity-approved tv show The Office: as late as ca.2009, The Office has its big-fat-dumb-guy character, Kevin, awkwardly ask a woman he was interested in, "So, are you on...email?" I recall commenting on this before here at Peak Stupidity, but that joke could only work "for what it was" within a certain window of time; it would not have been a joke at all in the 1990s. It would have been too ridiculous by the 2010s. It needed to be a normal question plus x years to fit the big-fat-dumb-guy character.)
Revisiting the relative rankings, which I focused on in my original mega-comment on observations on the Adam Smith video (perhaps to later be adapted to a full post at HailToYou.wordpress.com as suggested), I had this:
"In about February 2003, AOL fades to fourth, displaced by Google. AOL will not recover."
That was my final mention of AOL in the mega-comment.
And now we see that the AOL absolute-visit peak lasts most of 2005. A strict application of the numbers would have AOL still at its peak as late as fall 2005, even winter 2005-06 or spring 2006 to stretch the absolute peak/plateau.
We are left with a variety of data-based "AOL peak" estimates falling in a wide window ranging from 1997 to 2005/06!
.
Thanks for tolerating my long comments ---- will check back in tomorrow, and curious what PRC-China Internet wisdom you have in store, as you hinted in the following comment-section.
Hail
Monday - April 3rd 2023 8:57AM MST
PS
"AOL finally peaked in absolute visits in the Summer of '00."
It looks to me, from the Addam Smith video, that:
- AOL visits absolute-growth stopped in early 2005,
and
- AOL began a clear and sustained absolute-visit decline only by spring 2006 (and exiting the top-ten two years later, spring 2008).
A strict interpretation of the numbers in the Adam Smith video would suggest the conclusion that "AOL peaked in 2005," which is some years later than what it would seem, if you asked informed observers and old-hand Internet Watchers to make an "AOL peak" guess.
Therefore: AOL is another good example of the "inertia" behind some of these numbers, the much bigger one being Yahoo as you've already discussed. AOL was no longer a mainstay of the driving-force of the Internet by the mid-2000s as it had been five and ten years earlier. But its numbers were still there to suggest it was so.
.
Here is another approach to AOL visit growth, per the Adam Smith video:
-- MONTHLY-VIIST DOUBLING TIME for AOL --
- Jan 1993: 100
- Oct 1995: 200 (= first doubling achieved)
- Jun 1996: 400
- Jun 1997: 800
- May 1999: 1600
- Oct 2002: 3200 (= fifth doubling achieved)
AOL never achieved a sixth doubling in monthly-visits (over its Jan. 1993 numbers), but came close during its long 2005 peak.
"AOL finally peaked in absolute visits in the Summer of '00."
It looks to me, from the Addam Smith video, that:
- AOL visits absolute-growth stopped in early 2005,
and
- AOL began a clear and sustained absolute-visit decline only by spring 2006 (and exiting the top-ten two years later, spring 2008).
A strict interpretation of the numbers in the Adam Smith video would suggest the conclusion that "AOL peaked in 2005," which is some years later than what it would seem, if you asked informed observers and old-hand Internet Watchers to make an "AOL peak" guess.
Therefore: AOL is another good example of the "inertia" behind some of these numbers, the much bigger one being Yahoo as you've already discussed. AOL was no longer a mainstay of the driving-force of the Internet by the mid-2000s as it had been five and ten years earlier. But its numbers were still there to suggest it was so.
.
Here is another approach to AOL visit growth, per the Adam Smith video:
-- MONTHLY-VIIST DOUBLING TIME for AOL --
- Jan 1993: 100
- Oct 1995: 200 (= first doubling achieved)
- Jun 1996: 400
- Jun 1997: 800
- May 1999: 1600
- Oct 2002: 3200 (= fifth doubling achieved)
AOL never achieved a sixth doubling in monthly-visits (over its Jan. 1993 numbers), but came close during its long 2005 peak.
Moderator
Monday - April 3rd 2023 6:41AM MST
PS: Yeah, I seemed to have juxtaposed the 2 movies in my head, Mr. Hail. They both starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and both of them are chick-flicks. No wonder. However, "Sleepless in Seattle" is from 1993. Now it IS possible that "you've got mail" could have been a thing already in '93. As with me at that time most people went on the internet purely to get mail. AOL was around, per the very first bit of the timeline.
"You've got Mail" came out in '98, showing that this was in the heyday of AOL. It matches the bar graph data. AOL finally peaked in absolute visits in the Summer of '00.
Sorry for the goof.
"You've got Mail" came out in '98, showing that this was in the heyday of AOL. It matches the bar graph data. AOL finally peaked in absolute visits in the Summer of '00.
Sorry for the goof.
Moderator
Sunday - April 2nd 2023 5:33PM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, that Belgian chat-bot story is something else. I had not idea those Sci-fi books and short stories that I read as a kid would be reality that soon - most of them on the bad side.
BTW, regarding web access in China, I will write a small blog post on that, with a few things to say - should answer your few questions.
BTW, regarding web access in China, I will write a small blog post on that, with a few things to say - should answer your few questions.
Hail
Sunday - April 2nd 2023 1:20PM MST
PS
Also related to the History of the Internet is the latest little flag in the sand of something going wrong:
Perhaps you've heard the verified story out of Belgium that a married man fell in love with a chatbot in late 2022 and early 2023; and a few weeks committed suicide at his digital-lover's urging, after long conversations in which the chatbot persuaded him that he loved the chatbot more than his wife.
The Belgian chatbot-lover's-triangle suicide is a disturbing new frontier on the whole "Internet dating" front--- if "Internet dating" it can be called.
The Belgian man's wife is said to have been outraged when she discovered her husband had been cheating on her with a chatbot, but I wasn't clear if she discovered it before or after the suicide. As far as I heard the widow is on a media campaign urging a boycott of the temptress-home-wrecker chatbot in question. (The whole thing sounds like a plot from "Futurama," if anyone reading this ever saw that show.)
Also related to the History of the Internet is the latest little flag in the sand of something going wrong:
Perhaps you've heard the verified story out of Belgium that a married man fell in love with a chatbot in late 2022 and early 2023; and a few weeks committed suicide at his digital-lover's urging, after long conversations in which the chatbot persuaded him that he loved the chatbot more than his wife.
The Belgian chatbot-lover's-triangle suicide is a disturbing new frontier on the whole "Internet dating" front--- if "Internet dating" it can be called.
The Belgian man's wife is said to have been outraged when she discovered her husband had been cheating on her with a chatbot, but I wasn't clear if she discovered it before or after the suicide. As far as I heard the widow is on a media campaign urging a boycott of the temptress-home-wrecker chatbot in question. (The whole thing sounds like a plot from "Futurama," if anyone reading this ever saw that show.)
Hail
Sunday - April 2nd 2023 1:16PM MST
PS
Wasn't there a late-1990s movie with the title "You've Got Mail," with Tom Hanks? It was about Internet dating, which was considered something very odd at the time, so the premise was at least novel.
I can't remember now but there may have been more than one movie with an Internet-dating premise back there. But the Tom Hanks one caused a real stir at the time, I think, and would be a useful data-point for anyone's attempt to write a History of the Interet.
.
Hey, come to think of it, have you seen or heard of ANY romantic-comedy movies of recent years, 2010s or 2020s, that featured Internet dating?
There must be some, right? But I've not seen or heard of any.
This despite the Internet now said to be the place "most" serious romantic relationships begin. Not sure if that particular data is reliable, or when the crossover-point was.
Wasn't there a late-1990s movie with the title "You've Got Mail," with Tom Hanks? It was about Internet dating, which was considered something very odd at the time, so the premise was at least novel.
I can't remember now but there may have been more than one movie with an Internet-dating premise back there. But the Tom Hanks one caused a real stir at the time, I think, and would be a useful data-point for anyone's attempt to write a History of the Interet.
.
Hey, come to think of it, have you seen or heard of ANY romantic-comedy movies of recent years, 2010s or 2020s, that featured Internet dating?
There must be some, right? But I've not seen or heard of any.
This despite the Internet now said to be the place "most" serious romantic relationships begin. Not sure if that particular data is reliable, or when the crossover-point was.
Moderator
Sunday - April 2nd 2023 8:39AM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, this stuff (which I started, of course) is not really aligned with the usual character of this site. However, it's pretty interesting in 2 ways, just the stats, way of measuring the size and power of the www, but also your discussion of how the internet is changing society, as the new TYPES of sites get big and overwhelm the old stuff.
Just a few points, but I'll write more later:
1) AOL, "America On Line" was not meant to mean only for Americans. I saw the name as like TBS's "America's Team" and the Atlanta Braves. To me, it was a way of saying "This is where Americans go to be on-line". They tried to have all the services available at the time, the primary being that dial-up (first) connection to the internet to begin with.
If people elsewhere went to the aol.com site, I'm sure that was welcomed - they just couldn't connect up via AOL.
By the way, their "You've got mail." thing was so well-known, that it was a feature of the chick-flick (IMO) "Sleepless in Seattle".
2) I came to yahoo for the free email account - I think 1997 at the latest. (Still got one of them, but this other got everything from 20-something years trashed, because I forgot about it for a couple of years.) I'm pretty sure that's why most people went there early on - they just wanted an email address - many likely didn't do anything else on the site or on-line period.
Yahoo got their search engine (originally google), and I'm sure people (like me) went there for search after a while. They became a real "portal", as in a way to do everything from one "place".
I was surprised by the video that yahoo really dominated (not necessarily as #1, I mean) the internet for SO long. I kind of forgot about them from 2010 or so, except to check my email, which is such a SPAM-filled mess, that I don't like doing it.
Mr. Hail, I'll address what you were wondering about China later on today.. Gotta go soon.
Just a few points, but I'll write more later:
1) AOL, "America On Line" was not meant to mean only for Americans. I saw the name as like TBS's "America's Team" and the Atlanta Braves. To me, it was a way of saying "This is where Americans go to be on-line". They tried to have all the services available at the time, the primary being that dial-up (first) connection to the internet to begin with.
If people elsewhere went to the aol.com site, I'm sure that was welcomed - they just couldn't connect up via AOL.
By the way, their "You've got mail." thing was so well-known, that it was a feature of the chick-flick (IMO) "Sleepless in Seattle".
2) I came to yahoo for the free email account - I think 1997 at the latest. (Still got one of them, but this other got everything from 20-something years trashed, because I forgot about it for a couple of years.) I'm pretty sure that's why most people went there early on - they just wanted an email address - many likely didn't do anything else on the site or on-line period.
Yahoo got their search engine (originally google), and I'm sure people (like me) went there for search after a while. They became a real "portal", as in a way to do everything from one "place".
I was surprised by the video that yahoo really dominated (not necessarily as #1, I mean) the internet for SO long. I kind of forgot about them from 2010 or so, except to check my email, which is such a SPAM-filled mess, that I don't like doing it.
Mr. Hail, I'll address what you were wondering about China later on today.. Gotta go soon.
Moderator
Sunday - April 2nd 2023 8:14AM MST
PS: Adam, I forgot to thank you for the list. What I'll do is search for variations of "Peak Stupidity" to see what they come up with first, then if not, if they learn quickly. These are small enough to where I don't do this to get the site at the top for the site but just as experimentation.
Hail
Saturday - April 1st 2023 1:53PM MST
PS
-- Highlights from Internet history: an analysis and commentary --
Let me present some extracts from the data in the video, lessons, and thoughts. It is as a series of observations in bullet-pointed form. The observations are based on (and according to) to the info in the video as presented, following the bars in the graph "as is," refraining from very much caveating as I did in a previous comment. There are lot of interesting points here, much of which points towards bigger truths that data alone can generally not quite do alone.
I begin:
- We see that already by mid-1993, Yahoo was the second-place or third-place rival to AOL, and remained so for years to come. (This 1993 data immediately raises questions because its wiki page says Yahoo was founded in January 1994.) (AOL = America On Line -- "America," does this mean it is for U.S. "websites" only? It would seem the data purports to be for the world.)
- From mid-1993 to mid-2000, Yahoo is near the top of the pack but always remains second or third to AOL.
- MSN exceeds Yahoo for much of the period mid-1998 to mid-2000.
- a comment on what we are actually looking at, or dealing with, when it comes to this earliest data: The 1990s Internet was tiny and not much of a social force, seen widely as maybe a fad, perhaps even a fad for the stupid or gullible, or for hyper-nerds, or for con-men. (See, e.g., the episode of The Simpsons that aired in February 1998 where Homer creates "Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net," a venture through which he stumbles and/or cons his way into creating a ground-up Internet company which doesn't actually do anything, but the success of which alarms Bill Gates. As the end of the episode, Bill Gates whos up to talk to Homer about "buying him out"; having brought along two goons, the squeaky-voiced Bill Gates orders them to "buy him out, boys!" at which the goons smash up Homer's home-office, destroying a company that didn't do anything anyway.)
- In 1999 and 2000, Yahoo catapults ahead, especially in the early months of year 2000, with huge absolute and relative gains. (Such a leap in data generally demands an outside explanation, and I don't have one).
- In June-July 2000, Yahoo takes away the top spot away from AOL. Yahoo is in quite a dominant by mid-2001. (Those who began to enter the online world in this period, by merit of aging-in or by situation, will have had a respect for Yahoo of a kind unrecognizable later.)
- Yahoo's big upward-leap, in the period around 2000, I believe coincides quite closely with the famous "Internet Bubble" ("Dot-Com Bubble") of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many went down, but Yahoo survived. It had become too big to fail in the Internet landscape of its day, I suppose. It sailed by the lesser-sized wrecked ships upon the Internet seas in late 2000, 2001, and 2002.
- By 2002, Google begins its rise into the top-end of the rolling bar-graph.
- In about February 2003, AOL fades to fourth, displaced by Google. AOL will not recover. (But AOL only exits the top-ten in March/April 2008.)
- Entering Spring 2004, Yahoo is still totally dominant, rater in the way the U.S. military dominates global military picture. Yahoo gets more "monthly visits" than its nearest six competitors combined! (MSN, Google, AOL, EBay, Amazon, Ask.com).
- January 2005 is an ominous date, perhaps, in human history: Google has shot up into second-place, up from literally nothing a few years earlier.
- Trend-watchers likely by 2004/2005 could see Google on a trajectory to displace Yahoo. Futurists were probably able to see the outlines of the world of the 2010s-2020s world we now inhabit, with Big Tech mediating much of life. But as of 2005 the average man doesn't yet see this. (As of the early-2000s, even cell phones were not something considered a "must." The mid-2000s might be the final stages of a basically-dominant "Analog" world in the rich West. A certain Democratic candidate called Howard Dean had caused a big stir in late 2003 when he successfully mobilized his supporters to donate "online," rather than through traditional methods. Four years later, on Boston-Tea-Party-anniversary day December 2007, the head-turning Ron Paul Moneybomb happened, and was entirely online; the Ron Paul Movement of 2006-2008 was on average quite young, most supporters seemingly born in the 1970s or 1980s and in their teens, twenties, and thirties; it was an unusual mass-fundraising base, and one which succeeded but couldn't have succeeded a mere one or two presidential cycles earlier. By the 2010s, this kind of fundraising would simply be the mundane norm.)
- In mid-2005, AOL is still handing around in fourth place. Yahoo is still the leader (with 6x AOL's monthly-visits), but Google is catching up fast. Yahoo has only 2x Google's monthly visits in mid-2005.
- November 2005: MySpace enters the top five, displacing eBay. MySpace had a very fast upward run. It is said to have been founded in mid-2003, but was still largely unknown as spring 2004 opened. Soon thereafter it began major growth and entered the top-ten in May 2005. It had displaced Weather.com to take the number-ten slot at the time. MySpace later displaced MSN for the number-three spot in December 2006, which is about the peak of MySpace.
- November 2005: Wikipedia enters the top-ten. (Another ominous day in the formation-process of the Internet-as-we-know-it.)
- Yahoo stops growing in absolute terms in 2004. It remains on top in relative terms against any single rival throughout 2004, 2005, but by early 2006 any good trends-watcher is now definitely predicting its downfall at least from its hitherto-dominant position. Sure enough, Google is racing hard on the outside track by fall 2005, winter 2005-06, and into spring 2006.
- May 2006: Google surpasses Yahoo for top spot. Yahoo is soon caught in something of a downward spiral and is losing visitor-flows even in absolute terms (despite more and more people using the Internet more and more by the month).
- As 2007 opens, the relative rankings with Google pegged to 100 are:
--- Google: 100
--- Yahoo: 70
--- MySpace: 17
--- MSN: 17
--- eBay: 13
--- Ask.com: 11
--- AOL: 11
--- Amazon: 10
- By 2007, the "Internet" as we now understand it was reaching a level of maturity and no big swings happen in the rest of 2007, with one exception: Youtube shoves into the top-ten, starting in September 2007. Surprisingly enough, it displaces Wikipedia, knocking Wiki out of the top-ten for a time.
- about February 2008: Youtube displaces MySpace for fourth-place. Youtube is one of the final big-players to enter the big ring, setting the stage for the 2010s-2020s era of the Internet as we now recognize it, but as spring 2008 opens we were not quite there yet.
- Another of the final big-heavies to enter the scene Facebook, which only enters the top-ten in April 2008. (I myself got a Facebook account in about fall 2007. I recall seeing it as a female-centric frivolity at the time, but was persuaded by one of said females to join up at the time; it had the image of a cooler version of MySpace, which had become 'ghettoized' since its peak a few years earlier.) (Later a mythology was built up around Facebook, to the effect of a Jewish genius is bullied by White-Christians but succeeds in creating a great Internet-thing.)
- MySpace exits the top-ten in December 2008, the negative-momentum against it having been unstoppable for some time. It was widely described using the analogy of "ghettoization" of a city area, whereas rival Facebook was cleaner-cut and analogized at the time and later to a safe suburban environment to which displaced people flee. This was not exactly the image of Facebook at the time of its ascent in the late 2000s, but it fits the overall Facebook-vs.-MySpace rivalry and explains it, I think, in broader context.
- Yahoo makes a recovery and an all-out effort to keep or recover its once-strong position, and has some success. After having relative and even absolute decline in the mid-2000s, Yahoo in winter 2007-08 and spring 2008 is making real gains again. How is this possible? Yahoo's turnaround seems another surprise demanding of an explanation. Then, in August 2008, Yahoo re-takes the top spot from Google!
- Yahoo's surprise comeback in 2008 may always have been Fool's Gold. Teenagers then coming of age, I believe, viewed Yahoo as old-fashioned already by 2008. There is nothing wrong with Yahoo objectively, and there is much to credit to it. I would hazard to guess that Yahoo is less evil than Google. But with the decline one is, in part, dealing with the madness of crowds. As I remember it, within just a few years of this 2008 Yahoo Comeback, the company would be seen as hopelessly uncool by a certain dumb-young-trendsetter type (I remember working with a guy in 2013 who had arrived fresh from sanctimonious San Francisco and gratuitously mocked Yahoo users).
- If we can take the data presented in the animated bar-graph at face value, I'd hypothesize that Yahoo's gains in its late-2000s revival may have been among older people coming online. These were actually gains in, and consolidations of, market-shares that although large in size were not the best element for the future of such a business. The reverse problem as MySpace had, which was ghettoized. Yahoo had something like an opposite problem, being seen as old-and-boring. I'd be surprised if very many people born after 1995 ever used Yahoo email addresses, possibly except email accounts set up for them by Mom and Dad in elementary school. OTOH, quite large portions of people born, say, before 1980/85 used Yahoo email, that is before it became de-rigueur to have a "Gmail" for social respectability's sake. (Not sure when Gmail attained that status, which is a little annoying to me.)
- July 2010: Google retakes the top spot from Yahoo. This is the beginning of Yahoo's end as a really major, top-tier played, from the Wild-West mid-1990s-Internet period, through the entirety of the 2000s.
- A few points above, I mentioned the Facebook Mystique that was created in the late 2000s as the company grew. In fall 2010, the Facebook movie was released featuring the hero nebbish Jewish boy defeating the villainous Gentile-competitors at Harvard, commented upon as such by Steve Sailer and his people at the time. The events depicted in the movie had happened only a few years earlier (2003?), but were romanticized as if from some far-earlier age.
- As the Facebook movie completed its regular theater run in late 2010 -- the entire movie an extended effort in what had emerged as the Big Tech we now recognize crowing its own successes and prestige -- the graph looks like this (late 2010):
--- Google: 100
--- Yahoo: 90
--- Youtube: 47
--- Facebook: 45
--- Amazon: 13
--- Wikipedia: 13
- In 2011, Yahoo fades again but the rest of the picture remains static.
- In March-April 2012, both Youtube and Facebook surpass a now-clearly-declining Yahoo. Yahoo had been again begun losing absolute totals for monthly visits some time in 2011.
- May 2012: Wikipedia enters the top-five for the first time, but only slightly edges out Amazon.
- fall 2012: Twitter enters the top-ten.
- By 2014, Yahoo's decline has become really noticeable and has snowballed. Although it is still in fourth place, the rivals like Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon are within striking distance trajectory-wise. Even some non-U.S. sites like Yandex, Baidu (PRC-China), and VK (Russia) are looking like contenders to possible knock-off Yahoo. One would think that especially PRC-China's quasi-mandatory web-portal would do this, as the PRC regime continues to bring its subjects online into the controlled PRC-Chinese Internet world. (Was/is Yahoo banned in China? Certainly much of the rest of the list is. as side-note: Yahoo was/is really big in Japan).
- September 2014: Instagram enters the top-ten.
- In the mid-2010s, perhaps by 2014, the Internet-as-we-know-recognize-it enters its "fully mature" phase. All the big players are recognizable.
- Over the eight to ten years from the mid-2010s to the early 2020s, following the attainment of the "Internet as now recognizable" status I mention just above, not much changes on the scene. Nothing like some of the big swings of the 1990s and 2000s.
- The main technical changes in the mid-2010s, late-2010, and early-2020s are faster speeds of devices and faster Internet connections including through 'phone' signals over the air, obviating many people's previous need for Wifi.
- The more important phenomenon of the 2010s, though, is a successful march-through-the-culture of a normalization of the Internet as arbiter of everything. This contributes to the ongoing sagging of civil and communal life, interactions of all kinds more and more going through the Internet, the Internet defining or setting the tone/bounds of "life" to greater degrees. With "life" moving (or having moved) online for many, the Corona-Panic as it formed in early 2020 was not met with mass pushback except by an interesting coalition of people about whom we have all written an read much over three years now.
- "Big Tech" in the 2010s, meanwhile, had become a fourth-estate of government. In effect Big Tech was a strong branch of the Regime. (See the cartoonist Banfield's 2021 cartoon I posted and commented on at the time: "America's Ruling Class, early 2020s" in Dec. 2021 -- https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/americas-ruling-class-early-2020s/. The cartoonist Banfield would definitely NOT have but "Big Tech" at the center of a collection of personified characters in a balloon representing the Regime in 1991, 2001, or even 2011, but it seemed natural and inevitable by 2021.)
- The 2015-16 political season: For all the talk about the role of Big Tech and "social media" in the 2016 presidential campaign, there is virtually no relative movement at all in 2016 in the rankings of monthly visits. See my comment above on the Internet reaching a recognizable-maturity by some time in the mid-2010s, this having happened all -before- Trump's "escalator" speech of mid-June 2015.
- The only relative move in the rankings in year 0261 was when, in Nov-Dec 2016, Wikipedia displaced Yahoo for fourth place. Yahoo had for years been outside anything one could really call "Big Tech," being more like a holdover from a previous era, its institutional inertia keeping it in the top-ten a lot longer than an objective appraisal might determined to be its importance and political heft. Yahoo News stories, incidentally, was one of those places where you could see "the comments against the main article" as someone described the 2016 election being about.)
- At about the time of the Trump inauguration (January 20th, 2017), the relative ranking was:
--- Google: 100
--- Facebook: 55
--- Youtube: 53
--- Wikipedia: 10
--- Baidu (PRC-China): 10
--- Yahoo: 9
--- Twitter: 8
--- Instagram: 6
-- Nothing much at all changes in 2017 or 2018. Two minor changes for the years 2017 and 2018: (1.) Twitter displacing a still-declining Yahoo (which took until Sept. 2018 to happen!), and (2.) degeneracy arriving in the top-ten with something called "X-Video" displacing Amazon out of the top-ten (Oct. 2018).
- (a comment on point-2 in the bullet just above: Shed no tears for Amazon, even if this data says it was displaced by "X-Video" in late 2018, for Amazon did more than fine overall, from sheepish origins in the early 2000s with a successful bookstore-killer strategy, to current global-behemoth with mega-profits, breaking all profit records thanks to the Corona-Panic of 2020.)
- When the Corona-Panic in Feb-March 2020 began, the relative rankings were:
--- Google: 100
--- Yotube: 38
--- Facebook: 37
--- Baidu (PRC-China): 8
--- Wikipedia: 7
--- Twitter: 6
--- Yahoo: 5
--- Instagram: 5
- In November 2020, Twitter finally enters the top-five. Twitter had entered the top-ten some eight years earlier (fall 2012).
- We may therefore have to reckon with more than one distinct period or phenomenon going on with Twitter growth in the 2009 to 2020 period, which have different characters. Twitter's upward-move in 2020 is poetically the same month as the disputed 2020 presidential election (but of course this data is said to be global and not for the USA alone).
- Twitter had long been identified as a main factor within the Trump era and the Corona-Panic for various reasons. Back when Twitter was in its still-very-early days -- 2009, 2010, and 2011 -- and generally far away from the top-ten, Twitter was widely seen as a frivolous, light-hearted, and content-free place for idiots to spout off short inanities (see the several mentions of Twitter on "The Office" episodes of that time; the writers tellingly put mentions of Twitter into the clownish boss Michael Scott's mouth). Some of us would say that such a character has never left Twitter, but it had become something socially much more serious by circa-2020.
- The data stops in January 2022. The top-ten had been just about the same for years by that time. The real story of the Internet dates to far earlier years, some highlights of which at the top I've tried to extract and make coherent here. There are many other stories with the Internet that are only weakly suggested by this data-set, including the role of pornography (the "X-Video" website's entry into the top-ten that happened in 2018), and the rise of dating sites and "apps," said to now be the main way relationships are formed and in many ways wreaking havoc on society for ways the Men's Rights people have identified.
- Another phenomenon not captured by this data is the rise of Blogging in the 2000s. Audiences are smaller for bloggers than the prolefeed one can guzzle down at Youtube on the like, and now Tik-Tok (to paraphrase Lenin, Tik-Tok is late-stage Internetism), and addictions successfully created by the Big Tech people. But bloggers have still been influential among those of a reading public such as it is now.
- I have to wrap up this little report and commentary in someway, so I will do so with a question (if anyone is still reading this far): What era of the Internet does the influential Steve Sailer blog belong to? He ran iSteve.com for years, which was a typical circa-early-2000s website cluttered up with things. The isteve.blogspot.com site came later and was streamlined without clutter. Now he has been at Unz.com for eight or more years (Unz.com is, objectively speaking, a very strange website, frankly; but the same kind of question could be asked about it: of what era of the Internet is Unz.com?). The Steve Sailer blog is ultimately is something from the 2000s. Sailer himself resisted joining Twitter for many years but then finally did, but somehow still blogs and does related writing and discussion-management something like full-time. In this he is continuing to carry the banner of the 2000s-era Internet. And that is not a bad thing.
-- Highlights from Internet history: an analysis and commentary --
Let me present some extracts from the data in the video, lessons, and thoughts. It is as a series of observations in bullet-pointed form. The observations are based on (and according to) to the info in the video as presented, following the bars in the graph "as is," refraining from very much caveating as I did in a previous comment. There are lot of interesting points here, much of which points towards bigger truths that data alone can generally not quite do alone.
I begin:
- We see that already by mid-1993, Yahoo was the second-place or third-place rival to AOL, and remained so for years to come. (This 1993 data immediately raises questions because its wiki page says Yahoo was founded in January 1994.) (AOL = America On Line -- "America," does this mean it is for U.S. "websites" only? It would seem the data purports to be for the world.)
- From mid-1993 to mid-2000, Yahoo is near the top of the pack but always remains second or third to AOL.
- MSN exceeds Yahoo for much of the period mid-1998 to mid-2000.
- a comment on what we are actually looking at, or dealing with, when it comes to this earliest data: The 1990s Internet was tiny and not much of a social force, seen widely as maybe a fad, perhaps even a fad for the stupid or gullible, or for hyper-nerds, or for con-men. (See, e.g., the episode of The Simpsons that aired in February 1998 where Homer creates "Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net," a venture through which he stumbles and/or cons his way into creating a ground-up Internet company which doesn't actually do anything, but the success of which alarms Bill Gates. As the end of the episode, Bill Gates whos up to talk to Homer about "buying him out"; having brought along two goons, the squeaky-voiced Bill Gates orders them to "buy him out, boys!" at which the goons smash up Homer's home-office, destroying a company that didn't do anything anyway.)
- In 1999 and 2000, Yahoo catapults ahead, especially in the early months of year 2000, with huge absolute and relative gains. (Such a leap in data generally demands an outside explanation, and I don't have one).
- In June-July 2000, Yahoo takes away the top spot away from AOL. Yahoo is in quite a dominant by mid-2001. (Those who began to enter the online world in this period, by merit of aging-in or by situation, will have had a respect for Yahoo of a kind unrecognizable later.)
- Yahoo's big upward-leap, in the period around 2000, I believe coincides quite closely with the famous "Internet Bubble" ("Dot-Com Bubble") of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many went down, but Yahoo survived. It had become too big to fail in the Internet landscape of its day, I suppose. It sailed by the lesser-sized wrecked ships upon the Internet seas in late 2000, 2001, and 2002.
- By 2002, Google begins its rise into the top-end of the rolling bar-graph.
- In about February 2003, AOL fades to fourth, displaced by Google. AOL will not recover. (But AOL only exits the top-ten in March/April 2008.)
- Entering Spring 2004, Yahoo is still totally dominant, rater in the way the U.S. military dominates global military picture. Yahoo gets more "monthly visits" than its nearest six competitors combined! (MSN, Google, AOL, EBay, Amazon, Ask.com).
- January 2005 is an ominous date, perhaps, in human history: Google has shot up into second-place, up from literally nothing a few years earlier.
- Trend-watchers likely by 2004/2005 could see Google on a trajectory to displace Yahoo. Futurists were probably able to see the outlines of the world of the 2010s-2020s world we now inhabit, with Big Tech mediating much of life. But as of 2005 the average man doesn't yet see this. (As of the early-2000s, even cell phones were not something considered a "must." The mid-2000s might be the final stages of a basically-dominant "Analog" world in the rich West. A certain Democratic candidate called Howard Dean had caused a big stir in late 2003 when he successfully mobilized his supporters to donate "online," rather than through traditional methods. Four years later, on Boston-Tea-Party-anniversary day December 2007, the head-turning Ron Paul Moneybomb happened, and was entirely online; the Ron Paul Movement of 2006-2008 was on average quite young, most supporters seemingly born in the 1970s or 1980s and in their teens, twenties, and thirties; it was an unusual mass-fundraising base, and one which succeeded but couldn't have succeeded a mere one or two presidential cycles earlier. By the 2010s, this kind of fundraising would simply be the mundane norm.)
- In mid-2005, AOL is still handing around in fourth place. Yahoo is still the leader (with 6x AOL's monthly-visits), but Google is catching up fast. Yahoo has only 2x Google's monthly visits in mid-2005.
- November 2005: MySpace enters the top five, displacing eBay. MySpace had a very fast upward run. It is said to have been founded in mid-2003, but was still largely unknown as spring 2004 opened. Soon thereafter it began major growth and entered the top-ten in May 2005. It had displaced Weather.com to take the number-ten slot at the time. MySpace later displaced MSN for the number-three spot in December 2006, which is about the peak of MySpace.
- November 2005: Wikipedia enters the top-ten. (Another ominous day in the formation-process of the Internet-as-we-know-it.)
- Yahoo stops growing in absolute terms in 2004. It remains on top in relative terms against any single rival throughout 2004, 2005, but by early 2006 any good trends-watcher is now definitely predicting its downfall at least from its hitherto-dominant position. Sure enough, Google is racing hard on the outside track by fall 2005, winter 2005-06, and into spring 2006.
- May 2006: Google surpasses Yahoo for top spot. Yahoo is soon caught in something of a downward spiral and is losing visitor-flows even in absolute terms (despite more and more people using the Internet more and more by the month).
- As 2007 opens, the relative rankings with Google pegged to 100 are:
--- Google: 100
--- Yahoo: 70
--- MySpace: 17
--- MSN: 17
--- eBay: 13
--- Ask.com: 11
--- AOL: 11
--- Amazon: 10
- By 2007, the "Internet" as we now understand it was reaching a level of maturity and no big swings happen in the rest of 2007, with one exception: Youtube shoves into the top-ten, starting in September 2007. Surprisingly enough, it displaces Wikipedia, knocking Wiki out of the top-ten for a time.
- about February 2008: Youtube displaces MySpace for fourth-place. Youtube is one of the final big-players to enter the big ring, setting the stage for the 2010s-2020s era of the Internet as we now recognize it, but as spring 2008 opens we were not quite there yet.
- Another of the final big-heavies to enter the scene Facebook, which only enters the top-ten in April 2008. (I myself got a Facebook account in about fall 2007. I recall seeing it as a female-centric frivolity at the time, but was persuaded by one of said females to join up at the time; it had the image of a cooler version of MySpace, which had become 'ghettoized' since its peak a few years earlier.) (Later a mythology was built up around Facebook, to the effect of a Jewish genius is bullied by White-Christians but succeeds in creating a great Internet-thing.)
- MySpace exits the top-ten in December 2008, the negative-momentum against it having been unstoppable for some time. It was widely described using the analogy of "ghettoization" of a city area, whereas rival Facebook was cleaner-cut and analogized at the time and later to a safe suburban environment to which displaced people flee. This was not exactly the image of Facebook at the time of its ascent in the late 2000s, but it fits the overall Facebook-vs.-MySpace rivalry and explains it, I think, in broader context.
- Yahoo makes a recovery and an all-out effort to keep or recover its once-strong position, and has some success. After having relative and even absolute decline in the mid-2000s, Yahoo in winter 2007-08 and spring 2008 is making real gains again. How is this possible? Yahoo's turnaround seems another surprise demanding of an explanation. Then, in August 2008, Yahoo re-takes the top spot from Google!
- Yahoo's surprise comeback in 2008 may always have been Fool's Gold. Teenagers then coming of age, I believe, viewed Yahoo as old-fashioned already by 2008. There is nothing wrong with Yahoo objectively, and there is much to credit to it. I would hazard to guess that Yahoo is less evil than Google. But with the decline one is, in part, dealing with the madness of crowds. As I remember it, within just a few years of this 2008 Yahoo Comeback, the company would be seen as hopelessly uncool by a certain dumb-young-trendsetter type (I remember working with a guy in 2013 who had arrived fresh from sanctimonious San Francisco and gratuitously mocked Yahoo users).
- If we can take the data presented in the animated bar-graph at face value, I'd hypothesize that Yahoo's gains in its late-2000s revival may have been among older people coming online. These were actually gains in, and consolidations of, market-shares that although large in size were not the best element for the future of such a business. The reverse problem as MySpace had, which was ghettoized. Yahoo had something like an opposite problem, being seen as old-and-boring. I'd be surprised if very many people born after 1995 ever used Yahoo email addresses, possibly except email accounts set up for them by Mom and Dad in elementary school. OTOH, quite large portions of people born, say, before 1980/85 used Yahoo email, that is before it became de-rigueur to have a "Gmail" for social respectability's sake. (Not sure when Gmail attained that status, which is a little annoying to me.)
- July 2010: Google retakes the top spot from Yahoo. This is the beginning of Yahoo's end as a really major, top-tier played, from the Wild-West mid-1990s-Internet period, through the entirety of the 2000s.
- A few points above, I mentioned the Facebook Mystique that was created in the late 2000s as the company grew. In fall 2010, the Facebook movie was released featuring the hero nebbish Jewish boy defeating the villainous Gentile-competitors at Harvard, commented upon as such by Steve Sailer and his people at the time. The events depicted in the movie had happened only a few years earlier (2003?), but were romanticized as if from some far-earlier age.
- As the Facebook movie completed its regular theater run in late 2010 -- the entire movie an extended effort in what had emerged as the Big Tech we now recognize crowing its own successes and prestige -- the graph looks like this (late 2010):
--- Google: 100
--- Yahoo: 90
--- Youtube: 47
--- Facebook: 45
--- Amazon: 13
--- Wikipedia: 13
- In 2011, Yahoo fades again but the rest of the picture remains static.
- In March-April 2012, both Youtube and Facebook surpass a now-clearly-declining Yahoo. Yahoo had been again begun losing absolute totals for monthly visits some time in 2011.
- May 2012: Wikipedia enters the top-five for the first time, but only slightly edges out Amazon.
- fall 2012: Twitter enters the top-ten.
- By 2014, Yahoo's decline has become really noticeable and has snowballed. Although it is still in fourth place, the rivals like Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon are within striking distance trajectory-wise. Even some non-U.S. sites like Yandex, Baidu (PRC-China), and VK (Russia) are looking like contenders to possible knock-off Yahoo. One would think that especially PRC-China's quasi-mandatory web-portal would do this, as the PRC regime continues to bring its subjects online into the controlled PRC-Chinese Internet world. (Was/is Yahoo banned in China? Certainly much of the rest of the list is. as side-note: Yahoo was/is really big in Japan).
- September 2014: Instagram enters the top-ten.
- In the mid-2010s, perhaps by 2014, the Internet-as-we-know-recognize-it enters its "fully mature" phase. All the big players are recognizable.
- Over the eight to ten years from the mid-2010s to the early 2020s, following the attainment of the "Internet as now recognizable" status I mention just above, not much changes on the scene. Nothing like some of the big swings of the 1990s and 2000s.
- The main technical changes in the mid-2010s, late-2010, and early-2020s are faster speeds of devices and faster Internet connections including through 'phone' signals over the air, obviating many people's previous need for Wifi.
- The more important phenomenon of the 2010s, though, is a successful march-through-the-culture of a normalization of the Internet as arbiter of everything. This contributes to the ongoing sagging of civil and communal life, interactions of all kinds more and more going through the Internet, the Internet defining or setting the tone/bounds of "life" to greater degrees. With "life" moving (or having moved) online for many, the Corona-Panic as it formed in early 2020 was not met with mass pushback except by an interesting coalition of people about whom we have all written an read much over three years now.
- "Big Tech" in the 2010s, meanwhile, had become a fourth-estate of government. In effect Big Tech was a strong branch of the Regime. (See the cartoonist Banfield's 2021 cartoon I posted and commented on at the time: "America's Ruling Class, early 2020s" in Dec. 2021 -- https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/americas-ruling-class-early-2020s/. The cartoonist Banfield would definitely NOT have but "Big Tech" at the center of a collection of personified characters in a balloon representing the Regime in 1991, 2001, or even 2011, but it seemed natural and inevitable by 2021.)
- The 2015-16 political season: For all the talk about the role of Big Tech and "social media" in the 2016 presidential campaign, there is virtually no relative movement at all in 2016 in the rankings of monthly visits. See my comment above on the Internet reaching a recognizable-maturity by some time in the mid-2010s, this having happened all -before- Trump's "escalator" speech of mid-June 2015.
- The only relative move in the rankings in year 0261 was when, in Nov-Dec 2016, Wikipedia displaced Yahoo for fourth place. Yahoo had for years been outside anything one could really call "Big Tech," being more like a holdover from a previous era, its institutional inertia keeping it in the top-ten a lot longer than an objective appraisal might determined to be its importance and political heft. Yahoo News stories, incidentally, was one of those places where you could see "the comments against the main article" as someone described the 2016 election being about.)
- At about the time of the Trump inauguration (January 20th, 2017), the relative ranking was:
--- Google: 100
--- Facebook: 55
--- Youtube: 53
--- Wikipedia: 10
--- Baidu (PRC-China): 10
--- Yahoo: 9
--- Twitter: 8
--- Instagram: 6
-- Nothing much at all changes in 2017 or 2018. Two minor changes for the years 2017 and 2018: (1.) Twitter displacing a still-declining Yahoo (which took until Sept. 2018 to happen!), and (2.) degeneracy arriving in the top-ten with something called "X-Video" displacing Amazon out of the top-ten (Oct. 2018).
- (a comment on point-2 in the bullet just above: Shed no tears for Amazon, even if this data says it was displaced by "X-Video" in late 2018, for Amazon did more than fine overall, from sheepish origins in the early 2000s with a successful bookstore-killer strategy, to current global-behemoth with mega-profits, breaking all profit records thanks to the Corona-Panic of 2020.)
- When the Corona-Panic in Feb-March 2020 began, the relative rankings were:
--- Google: 100
--- Yotube: 38
--- Facebook: 37
--- Baidu (PRC-China): 8
--- Wikipedia: 7
--- Twitter: 6
--- Yahoo: 5
--- Instagram: 5
- In November 2020, Twitter finally enters the top-five. Twitter had entered the top-ten some eight years earlier (fall 2012).
- We may therefore have to reckon with more than one distinct period or phenomenon going on with Twitter growth in the 2009 to 2020 period, which have different characters. Twitter's upward-move in 2020 is poetically the same month as the disputed 2020 presidential election (but of course this data is said to be global and not for the USA alone).
- Twitter had long been identified as a main factor within the Trump era and the Corona-Panic for various reasons. Back when Twitter was in its still-very-early days -- 2009, 2010, and 2011 -- and generally far away from the top-ten, Twitter was widely seen as a frivolous, light-hearted, and content-free place for idiots to spout off short inanities (see the several mentions of Twitter on "The Office" episodes of that time; the writers tellingly put mentions of Twitter into the clownish boss Michael Scott's mouth). Some of us would say that such a character has never left Twitter, but it had become something socially much more serious by circa-2020.
- The data stops in January 2022. The top-ten had been just about the same for years by that time. The real story of the Internet dates to far earlier years, some highlights of which at the top I've tried to extract and make coherent here. There are many other stories with the Internet that are only weakly suggested by this data-set, including the role of pornography (the "X-Video" website's entry into the top-ten that happened in 2018), and the rise of dating sites and "apps," said to now be the main way relationships are formed and in many ways wreaking havoc on society for ways the Men's Rights people have identified.
- Another phenomenon not captured by this data is the rise of Blogging in the 2000s. Audiences are smaller for bloggers than the prolefeed one can guzzle down at Youtube on the like, and now Tik-Tok (to paraphrase Lenin, Tik-Tok is late-stage Internetism), and addictions successfully created by the Big Tech people. But bloggers have still been influential among those of a reading public such as it is now.
- I have to wrap up this little report and commentary in someway, so I will do so with a question (if anyone is still reading this far): What era of the Internet does the influential Steve Sailer blog belong to? He ran iSteve.com for years, which was a typical circa-early-2000s website cluttered up with things. The isteve.blogspot.com site came later and was streamlined without clutter. Now he has been at Unz.com for eight or more years (Unz.com is, objectively speaking, a very strange website, frankly; but the same kind of question could be asked about it: of what era of the Internet is Unz.com?). The Steve Sailer blog is ultimately is something from the 2000s. Sailer himself resisted joining Twitter for many years but then finally did, but somehow still blogs and does related writing and discussion-management something like full-time. In this he is continuing to carry the banner of the 2000s-era Internet. And that is not a bad thing.
Hail
Saturday - April 1st 2023 9:38AM MST
PS
Moderator wrote: "I guess you've seen a few more too, or is that the only one you have viewed?"
That is the only one I have seen. From my understanding it is the only one they have released so far but that more are coming.
Moderator wrote: "I guess you've seen a few more too, or is that the only one you have viewed?"
That is the only one I have seen. From my understanding it is the only one they have released so far but that more are coming.
The Alarmist
Saturday - April 1st 2023 4:35AM MST
PS
You can use the old radio phrase, “Sent across (or into) the ether” (or æther, if you so like) .... Michelson and Morely can go eff themselves.
You can use the old radio phrase, “Sent across (or into) the ether” (or æther, if you so like) .... Michelson and Morely can go eff themselves.
Moderator
Friday - March 31st 2023 9:30PM MST
PS: Got the link to your video in the post now, Mr. Smith. Thank you. Oh, snap. That means I can do an embed too - that didn't occur to me till just now.
Before I get to that, on DeSantis and extradition, his statement shows 2 things:
1) He's not being vindictive and petty, the way Trump gets. In fact, this is pretty much the opposite.
2) He's showing what Federalism, or standing up to the left, if anything, is about. (Maybe teaching Trump a thing or two, if the guy can learn anything.)
Before I get to that, on DeSantis and extradition, his statement shows 2 things:
1) He's not being vindictive and petty, the way Trump gets. In fact, this is pretty much the opposite.
2) He's showing what Federalism, or standing up to the left, if anything, is about. (Maybe teaching Trump a thing or two, if the guy can learn anything.)
Adam Smith
Friday - March 31st 2023 9:20PM MST
PS: Good evening, Mr. Moderator, Mr. Hail,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QLEncMkLOs
Interesting time to run attack ads on DeSantis; meanwhile...
“Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda”
"Does this sound right in your recollection?" Yes.
☮
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QLEncMkLOs
Interesting time to run attack ads on DeSantis; meanwhile...
“Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda”
"Does this sound right in your recollection?" Yes.
☮
Moderator
Friday - March 31st 2023 7:58PM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, I'm amazed that the Trump crowd put out that ad that basically could have been made by the Romney's Jeb's, or any of Conservative, Inc, or the D's, for that matter. I realize there was some brewhaha about the cutting of SS - some Dems flat-out lied (or was in Joe in the SOTU?) that R's were going to cut SS.
Well, shoot, SS is going down anyway. Whether DeSantis voted that way or not, I sure would. This whole financial thing coming is going to be painful. DeSantis has guts if he voted that way, I agree with him if he did, and, finally, this ad was directed at boomers by boomers. I'm not sure why anyone younger would be turned off Ron DeSantis by this ad.
I guess you've seen a few more too, or is that the only one you have viewed? (I don't mean as a youtube clip, but as an actual ad ON youtube or on TV.)
Well, shoot, SS is going down anyway. Whether DeSantis voted that way or not, I sure would. This whole financial thing coming is going to be painful. DeSantis has guts if he voted that way, I agree with him if he did, and, finally, this ad was directed at boomers by boomers. I'm not sure why anyone younger would be turned off Ron DeSantis by this ad.
I guess you've seen a few more too, or is that the only one you have viewed? (I don't mean as a youtube clip, but as an actual ad ON youtube or on TV.)
Moderator
Friday - March 31st 2023 7:52PM MST
PS: First, regarding the graphic. I could have taken a screenshot from the middle or the end, but this old stuff is interesting. Yes, the AOLs and Compuserves had their own home pages, and that portal was used by people who didn't know anything else - or there was not much else!
I did know that IMDB was around since early on - just people who loved movies and wanted to share that. It wasn't that long ago that the site was still pretty simple, it's front end looking like this was still 25 years ago. Now they've got the (usually woke) annoying graphics. IMDB got bought by amazon something like 20 years back, but I'm not sure what the deal is now.
I hope you will check out the video. I didn't realize how long yahoo's run as top dog was until seeing this.
I did know that IMDB was around since early on - just people who loved movies and wanted to share that. It wasn't that long ago that the site was still pretty simple, it's front end looking like this was still 25 years ago. Now they've got the (usually woke) annoying graphics. IMDB got bought by amazon something like 20 years back, but I'm not sure what the deal is now.
I hope you will check out the video. I didn't realize how long yahoo's run as top dog was until seeing this.
Hail
Friday - March 31st 2023 7:39PM MST
PS
Update on the Trump team's anti-DeSantis attack ad running on TV now (see bottom-most comment below)---
I managed to find it. It was posted less than 24h ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV3tgOiInMY
Your thoughts?
Update on the Trump team's anti-DeSantis attack ad running on TV now (see bottom-most comment below)---
I managed to find it. It was posted less than 24h ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV3tgOiInMY
Your thoughts?
Hail
Friday - March 31st 2023 7:36PM MST
PS
Do I read the graphic you lead this post with correctly that in February 1993, AOL had 21 million "visits," crushing nearest competitors Prodigy (3m), Compuserve (1.6m), and Yahoo (1m)?
(And IMDB existed in 1993? Who knew?)
I'm not sure these very-early statistics are really meaningful. These wouldn't be websites in the sense later understood. I think those 1990s companies (later known as "internet service providers") basically provided customers with access to the company's own little fiefdom.
Put it this way: Just as the early, 1990s-era Internet could be conceptualized by neophytes as data flowing through cables associated with phone jacks and a little magic box called a "modem" (which made funny noises like some old robot movie), likewise all online activity tended to funnel through the ISP for most people. AOL -was- the Internet for most of those users. It wasn't that they were popular, it's that to use the Internet they had to use AOL (or a specific competitor). Does this sound right in your recollection?
Do I read the graphic you lead this post with correctly that in February 1993, AOL had 21 million "visits," crushing nearest competitors Prodigy (3m), Compuserve (1.6m), and Yahoo (1m)?
(And IMDB existed in 1993? Who knew?)
I'm not sure these very-early statistics are really meaningful. These wouldn't be websites in the sense later understood. I think those 1990s companies (later known as "internet service providers") basically provided customers with access to the company's own little fiefdom.
Put it this way: Just as the early, 1990s-era Internet could be conceptualized by neophytes as data flowing through cables associated with phone jacks and a little magic box called a "modem" (which made funny noises like some old robot movie), likewise all online activity tended to funnel through the ISP for most people. AOL -was- the Internet for most of those users. It wasn't that they were popular, it's that to use the Internet they had to use AOL (or a specific competitor). Does this sound right in your recollection?
Hail
Friday - March 31st 2023 7:26PM MST
PS
-- Trump's new anti-DeSantis attack ads --
The Trump team has begun running anti-DeSantis attack ads.
These anti-DeSantis ads have begun airing today, prominently on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" among other shows. There is also a report that the anti-DeSantis ads have appeared on CNN.
The initial "ad buy" to get these anti-DeSantis ads on the air is said to be $1.3 million. Given the big-money behind the Trump-PAC running them, we can expect more ahead.
(See: "Trump Super PAC Puts $1.3 Million Into Taking DeSantis Out of 2024 Race," Bloomberg News, March 30, 2023).
The ad mocks and belittling DeSantis, depicts DeSantis as an uncaring, weakly principled corporate shill, a little reminiscent of the attacks on Romney as someone who stomps on the little guy and laughs all the way home.
The ad that the Trump team has begun running is titled "Think you know Ron DeSantis? THINK AGAIN."
The punch-line is: "The more you learn about DeSantis, the more you see: He DOESN'T share our values---and he just isn't ready to be president."
As the ad-run has only begun today, I cannot find any copy on youtube or anywhere for now.
-- Trump's new anti-DeSantis attack ads --
The Trump team has begun running anti-DeSantis attack ads.
These anti-DeSantis ads have begun airing today, prominently on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" among other shows. There is also a report that the anti-DeSantis ads have appeared on CNN.
The initial "ad buy" to get these anti-DeSantis ads on the air is said to be $1.3 million. Given the big-money behind the Trump-PAC running them, we can expect more ahead.
(See: "Trump Super PAC Puts $1.3 Million Into Taking DeSantis Out of 2024 Race," Bloomberg News, March 30, 2023).
The ad mocks and belittling DeSantis, depicts DeSantis as an uncaring, weakly principled corporate shill, a little reminiscent of the attacks on Romney as someone who stomps on the little guy and laughs all the way home.
The ad that the Trump team has begun running is titled "Think you know Ron DeSantis? THINK AGAIN."
The punch-line is: "The more you learn about DeSantis, the more you see: He DOESN'T share our values---and he just isn't ready to be president."
As the ad-run has only begun today, I cannot find any copy on youtube or anywhere for now.
RE: the AOL numbers in 2000-2002 and the false dawn of decline (delayed five or so years)
Ideas:
1.) It could be because new national user-bases were brought into the AOL network in 2000, 2001, 2002;
2.) It could be because the giant company-entity "AOL" bought some little-guys and boosted its numbers that way.
.
An article from that period:
_______________
AOL ADDS SUBSCRIBERS OUTSIDE THE U.S.
Jan 2, 2002 (- CNET -)
The America Online Internet service, a division of AOL Time Warner, says its membership outside the United States has surpassed the 5 million mark.
The company said its 70 percent growth rate over the last 12 months was fueled by the Pan-European trend toward wholesale, flat rate Internet access and AOL Europe's flat-rate plans and promotions.
The growth also came from marketing strategies, alliances, brand awareness and the launch of two AOL-branded services in Latin America.
________________
So.... by 2002, "logging on" to America On Line was starting to become one of the oft-talked about "jobs Americans just wown't do"!