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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (50196)	4/14/1999 10:42:00 AM
From: Sonny Blue	Respond to of 164684

Sarmad, it's expiration week. There is a lot of whipsaw and rolling over. It's just noise.

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (50196)	4/14/1999 10:45:00 AM
From: 16yearcycle	Respond to of 164684

I think your watching too much, but sure, I'd feel better if amzn were up 20 :>)

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (50196)	4/14/1999 11:21:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

The market is exhibiting classic "topping action". Also, hidden in many of the earnings reports is an underlying theme: "Our sales (page hits) have increased by X% but our margins have come under increased pressure." For the PC and semi industries, this sort of message is not unusual during this period of the year. There is often a new round of product introductions and price reductions compounded by "inventory adjustments" that cause this down trend in the business cycle to occur on a regular basis - but it still seems to come as a surprise to many investors and analysts. What is becoming more alarming to analysts and astute investors is the underlying pattern that is emerging. The portals continue to report huge increases in page hits and registered customers (registered customers is a funny metric - I must be registered as a customer at >200 web sites - does that mean analysts can claim me as a customer so on every one of them I'm worth thousands of dollars in stock valuation?) Recent surveys of Internet advertisers shows that about 2/3 of them will not renew their contracts with the web portals. This coincides with studies that show that advertisers are seeing a declining value in Internet advertising. The number of click throughs per page view has declined sharply over the past couple of years, (I posted about a trade article on this a couple months ago). It's now about 1/4 the rate of 24 months ago and still declining. Other metrics show that of the click-throughs, fewer numbers of people stay at the visited site and even fewer become buyers. Ads have gotten more clever and colorful but the novelty has been wearing off and people tend to ignore them. I personally find that while several months ago web ads were annoying, now I find that my brain automatically ignores them unless I have it in the back of my mind that I am interested in something. The human brain is the ultimate filtering computer. Once people get used to the new paradigm of the Internet, they find that they can train out ads. When they want to explore for products, then there are useful ways to search for them - the ads just aren't needed. Maybe that will change a bit when bandwidth increases allow richer ad content, but I don't think it will upset the basic dissociation between the interconnectedness nature of the web and didactic nature of broadcast media. The trend will continue. Web advertisers and media buyers at agencies have now had time to measure and analyze the effect of web ad revenues. The conclusion is that targeted web ads are an exciting new dimension but the self-directed nature of the web dilutes the effectiveness of the push type modality. Another factor is that the number of viable web portals or channels has grown dramatically. While a year ago few would have considered Lycos to be a dominant player in the same league with Yahoo!, now they are seen as a pace setter deserving of similar ad placement. What this comes down to is that web advertising has changed from novelty to a buyers market. Web advertisers are much less willing to sign long-term agreements in the midst of lowering ad prices and aggressive selling by the portals. Meanwhile, the portals "ain't dumb" as they adjust their strategies to become the "e-commerce portal" of choice. That makes sense, but that too is fraught with the fact that many more sites are springing up each day with increasingly lucrative offers of free web sites, lower rates for doing business, and more features. The market is being inexorably driven toward the lowest common denominator of competition - ruthless price competition. This is a topic that can take an entire MBA study course to do it justice and its unfolding is just begun. The ramifications of these trends are unlikely to become of much importance to investors or apparent to the average ANAL for at least another year.