To all - WSJ article about people having the Internet connected 24 hours a day, and Internet content designed to appeal to those people.
June 16, 1999
The New Internet, 24/7: Web Sites
Court Folks Who Are Always Online
By THOMAS E. WEBER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
What happens when connecting to the Internet is so easy that households will
stay online all day long?
That time is coming soon, and it has the Web industry racing to prepare for an
entirely new business model. In the new era, a typical customer will look like
Mike Thaler, a real-estate investor in Berkeley, Calif. He recently upgraded his
Internet connection to a speedy digital subscriber line.
When Mr.
Thaler wanted
to check when
the "All-Star
Tribute to
Johnny Cash"
would be on
TV, he realized
it would be
easier to look
up the show
online than to
thumb through
his printed TV
Guide. "Now
you're always
online," Mr.
Thaler says.
"It's sure a lot
easier than dialing up and waiting to connect."
Digital subscriber lines, cable modems and other ultra-fast technologies offer
Internet connections that are plugged in from the minute the computer is
turned on, just the way your cable service is on as soon as you turn on the TV
set. There's no waiting for a creaky telephone modem to dial up or download.
As a result, Web surfing is evolving from a discrete activity -- something
people might do for an hour or so at a time -- into an activity people perform
many times throughout the day as they go about their daily routine.
The emerging pattern of continuous Web use shifts the playing field for Web
portals and advertisers, who depend on counting consumers' eyeballs for
profit. After years spent gearing their offerings to people who surf for hours at
a time, America Online Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and other Web companies are mulling
over what to offer people who surf in short, spontaneous trips. At present,
most Web-site strategies are designed to grab consumers and hold onto them
for as long as possible. By contrast, in an always-online world, the point might
be to grab a person 10 times throughout the day, even if only for a minute or
two.
The changes are already apparent. AOL, for example, in April paid an estimated
$150 million to buy When.com, a Redwood City, Calif., Internet company
whose Web site is a calendar. Users customize it to keep their personal
schedules and to notify them of upcoming events in fields such as the arts,
business or sports. Such an online calendar might not be that useful for
consumers who use dial-up Web connections. After all, why boot up and dial
into the Internet just to note next Sunday's dinner with Aunt Ruthie?
But for consumers who are always online, the calendar would be as easy to
use as an old-fashioned date book. For AOL, When.com also is an opportunity
to cross-sell other AOL services. For example, it not only notifies users about
a movie opening but also suggests they buy tickets online from AOL's
MovieFone service.
Trying Different Things
Calendars are one of a number of utilities for always-online consumers that
Barry Schuler, president of AOL's Interactive Services Group, is experimenting
with. "A lot of what we'll roll out in the next year will be trying different things
to see what people get excited about," he says.
Some people find an always-on Web to be even more convenient than an
always-on TV. Aaron Anderson, an Austin, Texas, subscriber to the Road
Runner cable-modem service, says he is more apt to call up News Corp.'s Fox
News Web site than he is to tune into an all-news TV channel. "You can just
walk by the PC and check it," says Mr. Anderson.
At present, fewer than one million U.S. consumers use cable modems, digital
subscriber lines or other "broadband" connections. Media Metrix Inc., a New
York online research company, compared broadband users with old-fashioned
modem users and found the broadband users spent more time online but didn't
linger as long at the sites they visited.
Executives at the MSNBC Web site, an
affiliate of the MSNBC cable-TV news
channel, are hoping that in a
continuously online world, sites with a
steady stream of news or other
information will emerge as important
Web gatekeepers, in the same way
"portals" based on search engines, such
as Yahoo, have become the important
entry points today. "I think the
consumer will turn to whoever can best
provide these services," says Frank
Barbieri, business-development manager
for the MSNBC site, a joint venture of
Microsoft Corp. and General Electric
Co.'s NBC unit. (Dow Jones & Co.,
publisher of The Wall Street Journal and
the Interactive Journal, has a content-sharing agreement with MSNBC.)
If so, MSNBC might find itself as important one day to online consumers as
Yahoo is today. MSNBC has developed a feature it calls News Alert, which sits
quietly on a consumer's PC until MSNBC beams out a major breaking news
story. Such a feature would be useless on a computer connected to the Web
for only a fraction of the day, but MSNBC thinks it will be a powerful
attraction to users who are always online.
The MSNBC feature marks the return of so-called push technology, which
was all the rage in the online world back in 1996. Back then, an Internet
company called PointCast Inc. marketed a screen-saver that automatically
displayed news headlines, sports scores and ads on the screens of online users.
The company is still around, but the system never caught on the way
proponents had hoped. Still, the underlying idea -- beaming data onto
consumers' PCs -- is now part of virtually everyone's content plans for the
new broadband connections.
Tim Koogle, Yahoo's chairman and chief executive, studiously avoids the term
"push," preferring instead to talk of "notification" systems. He thinks a key
technology will be Yahoo's Messenger system, which displays a list of friends
who are online and available to chat. It can also notify you when you get e-mail
or when a stock in your portfolio tanks. AOL is pursuing a similar strategy
with its ICQ service, a more sophisticated version of its Instant Messenger
service.
A Thin Line
Over time, these types of messaging features may walk a thin line between
convenient and annoying. Too many ads, and they could turn into pushy online
telemarketers, calling you away from dinner to view a sales pitch.
What's more likely, executives say, is that the systems will dress up existing
e-commerce sites. Users of the online auction house eBay Inc., for example,
wouldn't have to make a special trip to the Web site, or even open e-mail, to
find out they had been outbid for those Pokemon cards. An alert could
conceivably track them down no matter where they were on the Web.
An always-online world may be more accommodating to other kinds of
e-commerce. Rich Frank, chief executive of Food.com Inc., a San Francisco
Web site where consumers can order food delivery from local restaurants,
concedes few people would boot up their computers and dial the Internet
solely to use his service. Broadband technologies could change that. "I believe
once broadband is there and people can get online anytime, it's a giant step
forward for us," he says.
Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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