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To: H James Morris who wrote (38501)	2/7/1999 11:08:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

6 (12/18/98), Ted shared with us his top predictions for 1999. Well, only one month into the new year, two of them have proven themselves out; first that consolidation would be rampant (AOL/NSCP, ATHM/XCIT, YHOO/GCTY) and second, that community driven content would be king (GeoCities' content certainly was key to Yahoo!). With that kind of track record, we thought we'd re-list them in full: 1. Success will be measured on time, rather than page views 2. Desktops, not portals, will be key. 3. Community-driven content will be king 4. All Internet is local. 5. Women become the most powerful demographic on the Web. 6. Broadband is key to commerce and community, not content. 7. “Generation ICQ”. Teenagers are trend setters. 8. Consolidation. 1999 will be a Darwinian year in the business. Trend Watch Content: Queen Today, King Tomorrow We had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with TheStreet.com over the last two weeks and hearing some of the particulars of their story, positioning, and business model. And though we'll have much more to say in future editions of The Internet Capitalist, we came away from the meeting thinking more broadly about the role that content has played and, more importantly, will play in the Internet's development as a consumer medium going forward, the outline of that thinking we detail below. The debate over the value and role of content on the Internet has ebbed and flowed for the last handful of years as this medium emerged. Observers have tried on the historical analogy of other media, television and print for example, and found it's definitions and precedents loose fitting. Sure we know how much The Lion King or Seinfeld is worth, but how much is original Web content worth? The consensus opinion on that score has been: not much. We owe this sad state of affairs to many conditions, not the least of which is the immaturity of the Internet itself. Advertisers are still just dabbling (less than 2% of all advertising is spent on the Internet) and consumers have shown exactly zero appetite for Internet pay-per-view. This has made the economics of being a content provider excruciatingly unattractive unless the content itself was broadly appealing enough to attract significant numbers of users (read: page views). Any publishers with less than, say, 20 million page views per day couldn't hope for much revenue. Tomorrow Is This Year We think that that's about to change. In 1999, we believe that certain content will come into its own and rightly be valued as a key component of the development of the Web as a medium for commerce and communication. What will emerge will be two worlds: commerce-driven content (like financial news, product information, and comparisons) and everything else. In this world, certain content will become highly valued for its ability to drive electronic commerce, for its ability to create revenue by providing context for the transactions that consumers are increasingly seeking to complete over the Internet. This type of content has its highest value where its relevance is highest, and that is indisputably at the point of sale: right before a consumer is looking to, say, buy a book or trade a stock. We tend to believe that the Internet as a medium in its own right has matured substantially (see our opening salvo on to this end in The Week, above); that advertisers and commerce sites have been disappointed enough with their .5% click-through rates and that they are now seeking to drive their marketing message or e-commerce transaction through the