The dream of the 1990s internet is still
alive, if you look in the right corners.
More than 17 million Americans regularly use
MapQuest, one of the first digital mapping websites that was long ago overtaken
by Google and Apple, according to data from the research firm Comscore. The
dot-com-era internet portal Go.com shut down 20 years ago, but its ghost lives
on in the “Go” that’s part of web addresses for some Disney sites.
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Ask Jeeves, a web search engine that started before
Google, still has fans and people typing “Ask Jeeves a question” into Google
searches.
Maybe you scoff at AOL, but it is still the 50th
most popular website in the US, according to figures from SimilarWeb. The early
2000s virtual world Second Life never went away and is now having a second life
as a proto-metaverse brand.
Some onetime online stars have stuck around far longer
than we might have expected, showing that it’s possible to carve out a life
online long after stardom fades.
“These are
almost cockroach brands,” said Ben Schott, a brand and advertising columnist
for Bloomberg Opinion. “They’re small enough and resilient enough that they
can’t be killed.”
A comparison to
scurrying bugs may not seem to be a compliment. But there is something
heartwarming about pioneers that shaped the early internet, lost their cool and
dominance, and eventually carved out a niche. They will never be as popular or
powerful as they were a generation ago, but musty internet brands might still
have a fruitful purpose.
These brands
have managed to stay alive through a combination of inertia, nostalgia, the
fact that they have produced a product that people like, digital moneymaking
prowess, and oddities of the rickety internet. If today’s internet powers like
Facebook and Pinterest lose relevance, too, they could stick around for
decades.
System1, which
owns MapQuest and HowStuffWorks among other websites, has a strategy to draw
people to its collection of digital properties through advertising pitches or
other techniques, turn them into loyal users and make money from their clicks
or other sales. It’s not far off the early-2000s web strategy of turning
“eyeballs” into revenue.
If today’s internet powers like Facebook and Pinterest lose relevance, too, they could stick around for decades.
Michael Blend,
CEO and co-founder of System1, said his company spent money on internet
advertisements to lure people to MapQuest and also improved its mapping
functions. One feature added since System1 bought MapQuest from Verizon in 2019
lets delivery couriers plot long routes with many stops.
Blend said Gen X
nostalgia or online marketing might persuade people to try MapQuest once or
twice, but that the company wanted to make the site useful enough that they
keep coming back regularly. He also said that more than half of people using
MapQuest are young enough that they might never have known it in its heyday.
Blend is proud
that MapQuest has stuck around as long as it has. “There are plenty of internet
brands that have come and gone and you never hear from them again,” he told me.
I do not have a
great explanation for the resilience of some 1990s internet properties. People
are searching for Ask Jeeves even though its owner, the internet conglomerate
IAC/InterActiveCorp, gave up the English butler name in 2005 and quit trying to
compete with Google search more than a decade ago. The website now called
Ask.com is mostly a compilation of entertainment and celebrity news.
A spokesperson
for Disney, which used to own the Go.com internet portal, did not have a solid
explanation for why some of the company’s internet sites still have
fingerprints of Go. (The Onion years ago mocked Disney for this.) Generally,
today’s websites are often built on top of remnants of the old internet like a
modern mansion erected on the foundation of a 19th-century home.
Schott mentioned
something that I cannot get out of my head. He said that when a once-loved
restaurant chain or industrial factory shuts down, the typical public reaction
is sadness for what people have lost. But Schott said that when internet
properties like Yahoo and Myspace sag or die, it’s often brushed off as a joke.
“There is a
weird schadenfreude when tech companies fail that I don’t think happens to
other industries,” he said. “I’m not sure what that is about.”
Maybe that’s
starting to change. When Microsoft retired its 27-year-old Internet Explorer
web browser this month, the nostalgia poured out. As the internet ages — and so
do those of us who remember its early years — the more we might feel stirrings
of emotion for what came before.
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