The Boom and Bust of the Dot Com Experience Ways That You Can Still Make Money on the Internet

Over the passage of world history, there have been episodes when people become obsessed about a particular commodity which seems an opportunity to ‘get rich quick’. Whatever the commodity, its price increases far beyond its genuine value, before slumping again rendering many investors broke. Look for instance at Tulip Mania in the Netherlands, the South Sea Bubble, and in living memory the Japanese property value boom and bust. At the height of the latter, it is recorded that the gardens of the Emperor’s Palace in Tokyo were priced (if developed) as more expensive than the entire surface area of Canada. Moreover, more recently than that, there was an example from the Internet business world, the famous “dot com” boom. Despite this, the WWW continues to be a sphere in which it is possible to make money from online jobs. So what is the truth behind the hype?

The beginning of the boom can be found the mid 1990s, when people started looking at the potential ways they could use the Web to grow an online Internet business, create online jobs, allow employees to work from home, and in particular to make a large profit. Why should anyone any longer go out to overcrowded shopping centres when they could look on the Web for anything they wanted and order items from their homes? Similarly, it could be feasible for somebody to work from home connecting to an office via the Web, as an alternative to struggling through rush hour jams to an office. Since the most widely used Web domain was “.com”, the enterprises involved acquired the nickname “dot coms”.

Although the bubble burst, and some well-known enterprises which had invested heavily in it went out of business, the World Wide Web is still in use and Internet business opportunities are expanding. Therefore, the basic reasoning that triggered the boom seems sound. So why didn’t things work out? Perhaps the cause of the bust was that businesses took a short term view, and were disinclined to build up business slowly over an extended period. Many companies made a loss in their first few years, as they tried to develop a customer base. That is perhaps normal. However their stock prices spiralled upwards, not based on their success but on an illogical “growth over profit” business idea. The emphasis was on investing in websites, generating online jobs and often reckless expenditure on top-of-the-range network infrastructure. Once these companies had a large number of customers, so the theory went, they would become profitable.

So great was the enthusiasm underlying the concept of Internet business, that companies would see their stock prices spiral when they simply affixed an “e-“ and/or a “.com” to the company title. That is because speculators were concerned with the surface appearance, instead of the real position of these companies.

The ’bust’ can be dated to the 10th March, 2000, when the NASDAQ shares index peaked and then suffered a steep fall. What happened is that a lot of shareholders belatedly discerned that the dot com businesses were hugely over-valued. Weak sales statistics for Xmas 1999 probably made people aware that the promised profits for dot com enterprises were basically fanciful. Another stumbling block was the time lost through hold-ups to websites due to missed deadlines and bugs in the websites, as well as second-rate website design.

Clearly hindsight is, as they say, that most precise of sciences. However 10 years down the line, one or two matters are obvious. Money can be made by means of Internet business. Even so, there is no fast short-cut to Internet riches. By employing Web technologies, people can work from home in a range of online jobs and grow a profitable Internet business. It won’t allow you to make a fortune by next year, but it can give you a stable and fulfilling career.