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Flashback From 1998: When Altavista, Lycos And Porn Ruled the Web

unearthed

by Philip Bump | 11:16 am, March 23rd, 2010

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Media Metrix, December 1998 (Before we dig too far into this, you may want to visit the 56k Modem Emulator, to establish the proper sonic mood. Ah, that beloved squeal.)

A colleague (who is handsome and wise) recently discovered an old Media Metrix report delineating “World Wide Web Audience Ratings” for December 1998. It’s a remarkable study, categorizing thousands of sites and conglomerated web companies.

This thing is like finding election results from 1880; like coming across the original Billboard music chart. It looks familiar, like you should know all of the component elements, but it’s unrecognizable. As though they’re all brands made up for movies.

Before we get into examples of what I mean, I’d like to point something else out. What I have here before me is a 300-page spiral bound book. As in, paper. As in, in 1998, Media Metrix printed out thousands of 300-page books to give to people to deepen their understanding of the Web. I considered various analogies here, and settled on this one.

So, join me as we walk twelve years backward into the halcyon days of the World Wide Web.

The Introduction
An informative Venn diagram The modern usefulness of the introduction can be summarized by the image at left. In 1998, those paying for detailed statistics about various web properties were nonetheless stymied by the concept of visiting a site from work and home. (They were also stymied by Venn diagrams, necessitating a labeling of the overlap.)

If you’re actually interested in the data, here are the demographics used. A solid million of them were teenage girls, and yet Justin Bieber is nowhere to be found, despite already being four years old.

>>>NEXT PAGE: The Rankings:

Pages: 1 2

Amazon, AOL, Bloomberg, Blue Mountain Arts, Chatroulette, CNET, Compuserve, eBay, ESPN.com, News Corp., Philip Bump, Sexplosion2.com, The Wayback Machine, Time Warner, Weather.com, Yahoo

http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

As an oldster, I’ll let you know that internet.com was how we taught each other the technologies to build out the World Wide Web and they had (have) a lot of information about monetizing it. Plus, they had a Pointcast channel and several news sites which would not only keep us abreast of happenings in the industry, but they were also great tools to try and profit from the tech bubble.

IOW: There were lots of us learning from each other through internet.com and their subdomains (javascript.com used to resolve to javascript.internet, but I see they’re now just a branded site) and because so many folks were trading tech stocks, internet’s news portals were a dominant resource and it all combined to make traffic.

As for the “education”, I’d say that they probably mean .edu.

Prior to the Mosaic and the graphical interface, pretty much everything of any value was on a .edu or .gov address, or it was on Usenet.

In fact, way back, when we’d run Veronica, Jughead and Archie searches, but after you needed Kermit… the most popular software/shareware exchange was an ftp directory at Washington University in St. Louis, which was still one of the go to sites in ’98.

Oh, and ’98 was just three years after you had to go yahoo.stanford.edu to access the resource and ’97/’98 was the timeframe they were transitioning from google.stanford, though back then, most of us still considered it a science experiment.

BTW: You know, I could tell you something about pretty much everything in your Top50 list.
So Phillip, if you have any questions… as always, good post.
http://www.pbump.net Philip Bump

wuarchive.wustl.edu. I’m a bit of an oldster myself.

I don’t remember using internet.com as a resource, though. Usenet, yes. And I remember seeing Google in its original iteration.

I certainly remember most the first time I used Mosaic. Underwhelmed, but got some sense of what the potential might be.
http://twitter.com/CRZ CRZ

I think Magister meant akebono.stanford.edu instead of yahoo.standford.edu, but I agree with most everything else.

In 1998, was ESPN over at go.com or still on Starwave?

That’s as nerdy as I can get right now. I trust a “20th anniversary of Gopher” is in the works for 2011?
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

@CRZ: You’re right… it’s been a long time.

@Philip: In addition to their javascript subdomain, I’m not sure when webdeveloper became sort of daily lessons, terrific resource and in addition to the how-to and trade-worthy news, internet used to have the only comprehensive list of affiliate programs, which I remember using trying to make a bunch of dimes.
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

BTW: Just as a side note… About six months or so ago, everything on GeoCities was deleted.

I had stuck some genealogical data onto my old, never really used GeoCities in 2000 to make it publicly-accessible and not subject to the whims of my business. Basically, I considered the GeoCities permanent, as long as I logged-in and uploaded a blank file every six months to keep it active, but probably about a year ago, Yahoo! said they were shutting it down and GeoCities is no more.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Sam-Pullara/2410418 Sam Pullara

@Magister Yahoo transferred Geocities archives to archive.org. You might see if your site was captured in that transfer if you don’t have a copy of it: http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php