The Highs and Lows of the Dot Com Era Ways That You Can Still Earn A Living on the World Wide Web

In the course of economic history, there have been occasions when nations become fixated with a particular commodity which they think is the chance to make big financial gains. Whatever the commodity, its price spirals to a level well above its genuine value, and then crashes again rendering many investors bankrupt. For example, Tulip Mania in the Netherlands, the South Sea Bubble, and in recent times the Japanese property value boom and slump. At the height of the latter, it is said that the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were priced (if developed) at more than the full surface area of Canada. In addition, even more recently, there was a case from the Internet business world, the infamous “dot com” boom. Despite this, the WWW is still a place in which it is possible to make money from online jobs. So what is the reality behind this episode?

The outset of this boom may be traced to the mid nineties, when people became aware of the potential ways to use the Web to generate online Internet business, create online jobs, empower employees to work from home, and of course to make a lot of money. Why should people want to travel to overcrowded shopping malls when they could browse for whatever they wanted without having to leave their homes? Similarly, it might be possible for people to work from home by means of the WWW, which is surely preferable to travelling through traffic to an office. Since the most popular Internet domain was “.com”, the companies concerned acquired the nickname “dot coms”.

While the bubble burst, and many companies lost a lot of money and went into receivership, the WWW is still here today and Internet business is still growing. So the fundamental business idea behind the boom must be valid. But things did not work out in practice. Perhaps the flaw was that people took a short term view, and didn’t think they needed to grow their business slowly over time. Most companies were not profitable in their first few years, as they tried to widen a customer base. That is a common experience for business start-ups. And yet their stock prices kept increasing, not due to their success but on an odd “growth over profit” business philosophy. The focus was on developing websites, creating online jobs and often recklessly spending on state-of-the-art network infrastructure. Once these Dot Coms had a large number of customers, so the philosophy went, the huge dividends would flow in.

So great was the anticipation underlying the area of Internet business, that companies would see their share prices increase 100% or more if they just affixed an “e-“ and/or a “.com” to the company title. That shows how the so-called experts were looking at the surface appearance, and not with the real position of these companies.

The end of the boom finally happened on the 10th March, 2000, when the NASDAQ stock index peaked and went into a ’bear market’. What happened is that a huge number of shareholders belatedly realised that the dot com enterprises were hugely overpriced. Disappointing sales figures for the previous Christmas may have made them understood that the hoped for returns for the dot coms were basically unattainable. A further problem was the time lost through hold-ups to sites due to project overruns and code errors in the websites, in addition to sub-standard website layout.

Clearly hindsight is, it is said, that most precise of sciences. But ten years down the line, certain matters remain true. Money can be made through Internet business. But there’s no rapid route to Internet riches. By employing WWW technologies, people are able to work from home in a range of online jobs and build up a successful Internet business. It won’t allow you to make a fortune by your next birthday, but it can offer a secure and interesting career.