A Walk down the Internet memory lane from 2000 to 2020

 I recently read a statistic that India has close to 700 million Internet Users (source: Statista) and I could not help but marvel at this number, I remember having made slide, where I have projected India to hit 100 million users, how things have changed since my early days figuring out the world wide web.

It was 1998, I was a student in the United States and like most International students, we worked on campus for  20 hours a week a, this and when one had free time, one would spend it surfing the “net” in the computer labs, where the Desi- boys worked part-time, you heard more Hindi and Telugu there any other language with some Mandarin and Chinese, not much English. It was a place, where boys from Guntur could write code in 5 minutes but struggled to write a paragraph in English, Our email client was on Unix with green fonts on a black background. You need to learn a few commands to make it work.

And it was there, when someone told me about a company called Amazon,  founded in 1994 and sold books online. We thought it was a catalogue service and I thought why would anyone name a company after a river? In anycase,

 I signed up just to check out it and clicked on the cheapest book available and then forgot.  I woke up the next morning and to find a cardbox with outside my front door, which contained the book. In my Indian mind, this was beyond unbelievable! Click and receive a book!! We used to discuss people will be able to buy clothes online (what a silly thoughtJ) or will a horizontal portal like Yahoo! be bigger than Microsoft or will anyone dethrone Netscape – the best browser at that time (side note: Microsoft gave IE free with Windows and killed Netscape)

So, when I set up my Amazon account here in India, I used the same email id that I had used in the US and to my utter surprise, their system in 2014 had stored my American address from 1998!  That is Crazy customer obsession.

This is a story about the old Internet so let us move to Bangalore in 2000. The Internet economy first boomed in India in the quiet not so sleepy town of Bangalore, where Pradeep Kar and his company Microland had the vision of building an Internet ecosystem. This was the year where most people did not have an Internet connection at home and those who did had the 56kpbs line via telephone where it took hours to download a jpeg (no video).  I was in the thick of action, working for an IT portal started by Microland called ITspace.com  (we called it Vertical portals as opposed to Indiatimes which was a Horizontal portal). Portals were the gateway to the net, could attract huge traffic and eyeballs and VCs then were chasing eyeballs (not very different world today).

It was the new economy, heady days where we all heard about Start-Ups and valuations without profits! Making websites using HTML was a high margin business, no plug and play, you had to hard code everything so Java and Javascript became quite popular.

My job as a young audience development manager was to analyze website traffic, you know the stuff you that you can get off Google Analytics? Well, Google Analytics did not exist then, we had to pull data out of the servers, take the .csv file and break it down in Visits, Visitors and Page Views. We came up with a metric called Pageviews/Visitor (what we call engagement now) to show the depth of our content. It was not the most exciting job but we were building the future and had stock options. The first advertising unit to be sold online was the 428X60 banner, I remember donning my sales hat and going to different companies in Bangalore and explaining to them about eCPMs, CTRs, Website traffic and sponsorship opportunities on our website. Our first client was Intel and later Microsoft. I used to make decks that said India has 4 million Internet users and we will grow 50% year on year. Such optimism where Yahoo and Altavista where the search engines and a ICQ was a messenger to connect with strangers. Companies tried eCommerce but the market was not ready for it. While the dotcom bubble burst in India, it laid the foundation of the Internet business and companies looking to invest in the digital business. And there was no such word as Digital marketing! We called it Internet marketing. There was an agency called Intercept Consulting that actually bought and sold banners online.

Soon, when I moved out from Bangalore and started working in marketing,, brands have begun to invest in display advertising and we started using Yahoo! homepage. Yahoo India was a very innovative company, they created interesting advertising ideas, there were in Rich media banners and the banner could fill the screen and do things. Digital technologies started evolving albeit very slowly.

It was 2004, when a sudden craze to grab a new email invite, called Gmail became the talk of the town. We were Yahoo mail or Hotmail users , were curious and clamored to get an invite to this new cool email called Gmail. One could not just sign up for Gmail, you had to get an invite for it. It was a smart strategy to create a sense of urgency for a new product. I often wondered why does Google have such boring interface and now we know why a single minded focus on Search has created a giant corporation. . I learnt alter that there were ads with text only that Google had started and like any good marketer I thought it was the most ridiculous thing, an ad without images! What next! We did not understand intent then and now it is the single biggest cash cow for the business. Incidentally, Hotmail was sold by it’s Indian founder i.e. Sabeer Bhatia to Microsoft for 400 million dollars and he became the biggest pin-up boy of the Internet age. Hotmail later became what we call Outlook mail.

In 2009, everyone began to talk about this website called Facebook, are you on facebook? And a game called Farmville and Twitter. There was no app and no Instagram, a pure desktop experience. We set up our FB page, thought that it is a great way to create a captive audience and communicate with them whenever we want, engage with them, watch comments, it was a heady feeling and then FB decided to limit organic content and suddenly we were forced to buy FB advertising  and grow “likes”. Internet users were still less than 10% of the population, however I have seen it when it was 0.5% of the population, while I believed in the digital world, most marketers were still obsessed with TV, Print and Outdoor. We started making Digital heavy marketing plans and changed our media mix.

Soon with cheaper mobiles, Apps and Games became the talking point, should a brand have an app? Or should we have mobile optimized website, I even wrote a deck on Apps vs Mobile website with the net outcome being that everyone does not need an app but a website needs to be optimized for the web as new users are coming from mobile.

In 2016/17 JIO launched and changed the rules of the game, access has boomed and I see the local vegetable guy talking on video with his family in a remote village in middle of India, it is now about building better for Bharat.

Now, I hear companies talking about their Ecommerce strategy, business plans are being drawn up with the same exponential projections, costs have come down with tools like Shopify and WooCommerce for building online storefronts while cost of customer acquisition remains high. Brands need to first start with market places like Amazon, Big Basket and then build their own platforms. Business online requires patience and performance marketing tends to plateau if you don’t have a sustainable value proposition.

And of course the fintech revolution with Gpay and PayTm, one of greatest innovations of this time

What will 2030 look like? It is anybody’s guess but I am willing to bet that this time some kid in Bangalore is more likely to create the next big thing than someone sitting in Boston or Beijing. We shall look forward.

 Here is what the gateway to the web looked like! Take a look.