The Lainson Cycle

I just had an online conversation with someone I used to work with at eMileHigh, Brad Spirrison. He's in Chicago and just started a column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Web still getting its feet wet when it comes to attracting ads

It's about trying to turn online video in an ad-supported medium. I remarked that it feels like 1994 or 2000 all over again (I was in those "how do we make money with content" discussions both times).

Now it's 2006. So I decided I will coin the "Lainson Cycle." Just as fashion and popular culture trends get recycled every 20 years, I'll postulate that Internet ad models will boom every six years.

In 1994 I was working part-time with the Apple Media Research labs in Boulder. The Web was still a new thing, AOL was the one major online network, and much of the rest of the online world was dominated by bulletin board systems. Apple had an experiment going with OneNet, which was an international link of bulletin boards. My job was to generate content to foster traffic and discussions. I was blogging back then. We just didn't call it blogging. The person at Apple who hired me was Scott Converse, who is now CEO of ClickCaster, a company producing tools to help podcasters.

OneNet worked on the principle that you paid a set fee per month and had a generous online time allotment. AOL was still operating on the pay-by-the-hour model. Those of us at OneNet said that wasn't a good model because it discouraged people from staying online, which was essential for them to become apart of the online community.

Speking of online communities, those were around in 1993-1994 as well. I attended a conference at Apple headquarters called "Ties that Bind." All the big online community people where there, including folks from The Well (which grew out of Grateful Dead fans wanting to stay connected), OneNet, the Boulder Community Network (one of the early public online resources in the country), online gaming creators/reseachers, virtual reality pioneers, and folks like Harold Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community. (Cyberspace communities greatly predate MySpace.)

Apple decided it wanted to duplicate AOL, and dropped OneNet in support of eWorld, which was short-lived.

At any rate, when I was having discussions with the folks at Apple trying to figure out what to do with the Internet, we were looking at a three-sided model -- content, users, advertisers. The same as today.

Apple closed up OneNet, moved out of Boulder, and I went on to do market research for sports companies.

Then in 2000-2001, I got back into online stuff, writing for CyperScene, Colorado Biz Magazine, and eMileHigh. Someone I knew online from the OneNet days, and who I then met in Boulder around this time, was Christopher Locke, co-author of the ClueTrain Manifesto. He was encouraging companies to start corporate blogs so that they could better relate to their customers and put a human face on what they did.

Someone in New York that I knew back then was Jason Calacanis (Jason Calacanis's Rise From Silicon Alley Cowboy to AOL Chief -- New York Magazine). Yet another was Nancy Evans, co-founder of iVillage. I actually knew her years earlier, during the pre-Internet days when we were both writing for magazines.

When the crash came, the advertising money dried up, and there was little incentive for any of us to keep writing about the scene.

And now it is back again. We're talking online communities, just like in 1993, and how do we monetize them. We are seeing a media frenzy about online companies, just like in 2000-2001. (Why is MySpace more of a buzz than world instability?) And presumably some of the biggest stories right now will disappear when there isn't enough money to support them.

Generating enough content is never the problem. There has always been user generated content -- for as long as there has been an internet. What has been in short supply are dollars coming in to support the costs of maintaining these online communities. The money that advertisers have to put into media and the amount of money that users can spend on entertainment and to purchase the goods that advertisers want to sell is more or less finite (unless someone figures out how to generate cheap energy and the world heads into new boom times). So we are always shuffling resources from one place to another.

What do you suppose we will be looking at in 2012?