The Ups and Downs of the Dot Com Experience Ways That Money Can Still Be Made on the Internet

Over the course of world history, there have been times when nations become obsessed about a particular commodity which seems the chance to make themselves rich. Whatever it may be, its price spirals far beyond its real value, before crashing back rendering a lot of investors penniless. Look for instance at Tulip Mania in Holland, the South Sea Bubble, and in living memory the Japanese house price boom and bust. At the height of that, it is said that the grounds of the Emperor’s Palace in Tokyo were valued at more than the entire surface area of Canada. Moreover, even more recently, there was a case from the Internet business world, the famous “dot com” bubble. Despite this, the WWW is still a place where money can be made from online jobs. So how can we find the reality behind the hype?

The outset of the bubble can be found the mid nineties, when businesses started looking at the possible uses of the World Wide Web to profit from online Internet business, create online jobs, empower employees to work from home, and last but not least to make themselves rich. Why should anyone want to travel to crowded shopping centres when they were able to browse for anything they wanted and order items from their homes? Likewise, it could be feasible for somebody to work from home using the Internet, rather than travelling through the rush hour to an office. Due to the fact that the best known website suffix was “.com”, the companies concerned were called “dot coms”.

Notwithstanding that the bubble burst, and a lot of companies consequently went out of business, the World Wide Web remains in use and Internet business is still growing. So the fundamental logic behind the boom must be well founded. What lessons can be learned from it? Perhaps the problem was that businesses wanted to ‘get rich quick’, and didn’t think they needed to develop companies slowly over an extended period. Many companies did not make any profit in their first few years, as they tried to develop a customer base. That is not unusual for new businesses. But despite this their stock prices spiralled upwards, not due to their profitability but on an illogical “growth over profit” business philosophy. The focus was on developing websites, generating online jobs and sometimes reckless expenditure on high-speed network equipment. Once these Dot Coms had a sufficiently large customer base, so the philosophy went, the profits would follow.

Such was the expectation behind the concept of Internet business, that companies might see their share prices skyrocket if they just appended an “e-“ prefix or “.com” suffix to their name. This is because investors were concerned with the surface glitter, rather than the actual viability of these companies.

The ’bust’ can be pinpointed to the 10th March, 2000, on which date the NASDAQ shares index hit its high point and then suffered a ’bear market’. Clearly a lot of investors suddenly registered that the dot com enterprises were critically over-valued. Weak sales figures for Xmas 1999 may have made them understood that the projected returns for the dot coms were simply unfeasible. A second problem was the existence of delays to websites as a result of projects running late and defects in the sites, and lastly poor site layout.

Undoubtedly hindsight is, it is said, that most precise of sciences. However a decade on, certain things are clear. It is possible to make a profit by means of Internet business. But there’s no quick route to becoming an Internet millionaire. By employing Internet technologies, you can work from home in a variety online jobs and build up a successful Internet business. It won’t enable you to retire by your next birthday, but it is a way of finding a well-paid and rewarding career.