The Top 50 Websites by Traffic in 1998 | Hacker News Reader

The Top 50 Websites by Traffic in 1998

geekosystem.com

48 pointsumiaq28 comments

All I can think of when I see this list is massive missed business opportunities. Quite a few of those business have absolutely no excuse for squandering their first-mover advantage (mapquest, altavista, etc).

Which is great because it makes me more confident of being able to overcome an established player in the market today.

There are good excuses, like browser capabilities, broadband, % of users online, ad serving platforms, ad agencies, mobile usage, knowledgable people/employees. Heck, I could go on and on and on.

There was absolute no way for Google Maps to have happened in 1999, the strongest evidence being that it didn't happen in 1999.

True but irrelevant. When Google Maps did happen, there's no reason why MapQuest could not have built the same thing at the same time.

The fact that they didn't, and that Google did, suggests opportunities for upstarts (sorry, startups) to get the jump on established players by introducing disruptive innovations.

Not to mention the fact that MapQuest took years to come out with something that even comes close to the user experience of Google Maps, which suggests to me that GMaps completely broadsided them, and that they didn't have anything remotely close to that sophistication even considered/researched.

It seems to be, as an outsider anyways, that MapQuest got lazy, not just out-done by Google.

Exactly, forgiveable that MapQuest didn't invent Google Maps, unforgiveable that it they kept the same ugly static maps for years after GMaps.

well, all this is true... but at least MapQuest is still around (since 1967). And I don't think GOOG makes any significant $ from maps yet.

Perhaps you tried to say that in 90s they should have tried to make a better search engine instead, apply advertising business model to it, make a lot of money... and then proceed to make the best maps on web by deploying those profits?

Because otherwise I don't see how MapQuest could have done it.

They worked on their business, not their technology. Since they were in the mapping business, they might have invested more $ into their mapping product.

Yes, there _are_ reasons, just because you think those companies could have worked around them doesn't mean they were not valid reasons.

More than half of the companies on that list is either gone or is irrelevant nowadays, which shows the vision being displayed on this thread completely out of sync with reality. It's sooo easy to come here and say that Company X should have done such and such to survive.

But most of them did not. So there are reasons, and they are good reasons, and I wrote some of them. I've made no comments about startups or disruption or whatever. I just disagreed with matrix saying "there are no excuses".

And we still have to go into the "real" reasons, which are fossilized business process and a reliance on cash cows, lack of innovation, etc... This is a classic case of people reaching the correct conclusion based on false premises and theories. It'll always be possible to overcome the stablished players, or opportunities for startups, but to keep saying there are "no reasons" for the old players to have failed is wrong.

High fixed costs can often be a factor. Google now has about a hundred thousand engineers, right? If you make a great ad network (and found way to make it scale without needing google-scale servers) google wouldn't be able to compete on price.

That's also why MS won't shift push a basic subset of HTML as a document format (using Word as something you use to lay out printing), leaving things like MediaWiki as the bees knees of collaborative editing.

I'm surprised you're getting downvoted. I completely agree -- the existence (and demise) of these companies are largely dependent on the circumstances of the time. For instance, a majority of the top companies were branded web hosting companies like GeoCities, AngelFire, etc. This market has shrunk considerably, probably due to the rise of blogs.

I don't think that market has shrunk. Essentially, Blogger & Wordpress.com are providing the same benefit to users that GeoCities & Angelfire did. Blogger & WP are both top 20 sites.

A lot of free web hosts. What I remember most about those days is how many people just created web pages about Star Trek or something, threw it up on a free web host (or even their ISP's web hosting), and sometimes even kept it updated. Now we have Facebook and Posterous and Wikia, but all of that tries to fit it in a box, to make it easy or private or constrained to the form of a blog or wiki or whatever. Back in the day you just wrote HTML files (there was even a form on Geocities to write an HTML file in your browser) and you weren't constrained to any real form.

I feel as though a table may have been a more appropriate way to present that data...