The The I'm your host Brian McCullough. This finally is chapter 7 part 1. The chapter where

we'll dive into the birth of Amazon.com and the rise of e-commerce on the web.

So let's begin by doing this.

If you were to do a simple thought experiment and put yourself back in 1994 when the web first

began to go mainstream, and if you were someone looking to launch a business on this new medium,

be honest with yourself.

What would be the logical business models that you would start to experiment with?

Well, the web first and foremost seems to be a new publishing medium, right?

So, launching a content site would probably be an obvious way to go.

Maybe you just port some real world media... probably be an obvious way to go.

Maybe you just port some real world media content onto the web, or maybe you launch some form

of web native content site.

And as we've seen in previous chapters, this is exactly what a lot of the early large-scale

websites attempted to do.

Sites like CNET, ZDNET, HotWired, and Pathfinder, to name just a few.

Alternatively, of course, you could maybe launch a service that would leverage the power of the web itself.

In other words, you could monetize the web itself. In other words you could monetize the web itself or

monetize the tools of the web and the unique features that make the internet so

wonderful. Obviously the search engines like Yahoo and Excite went this route, as did

early bulletin board sites and web-based email sites like Hotmail, rocket mail, etc.

And I'm thinking here of early online classified sites as well, like Match.com and Monster.

More on those in later episodes.

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