Web Masters

If you run a website, it probably has Google Analytics installed on it. Why not? After all, it's free. But what if your website is generating millions of dollars worth of sales a day? Would you still be using Google analytics? Probably not. You'd probably want something more robust because even a tiny optimization could generate huge increases in revenue.

Those kinds of companies turn to Webtrends, one of the oldest and most established names in website analytics software. In fact, when Webtrends was originally founded by Eli Shapira in the mid 1990s, the concept of website analytics didn't even exist.

On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how Eli launched Webtrends, grew it, and took it public in the span of a few short years. Even more impressive, he did it without taking a penny of venture capital funding, an accomplishment for a tech company that's almost unheard of.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

You’ve surely heard of Mark Cuban. You know he’s the outspoken owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. You also know he’s on Shark Tank. And you know he’s a billionaire. But do you know how he became a billionaire?

The easy answer is, of course, “Internet stuff.” In 1999, he sold his tech startup, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. But do you know the story behind why that company got started and how it achieved its first major successes?

That's what you'll learn about on this episode of Web Masters thanks to a conversation with Chris Jaeb. Chris shares the little known story of how he came up with the initial idea and started the company that would eventually be bought out by Mark Cuban and become Broadcast.com.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Before platforms like Facebook and Twitter, learning about current events online across a range of topics, subjects, and industries required visiting lots of different websites. That began to change thanks to platforms like Slashdot.

Slashdot was one of the first -- if not the first -- popular social news aggregators. Readers would submit stories they thought were interesting, and then Slashdot’s moderation team -- headed by Slashdot founder Rob Malda -- would select the best ones and display them on the homepage, which was a constantly updating feed of the aggregated stories. Users could then comment on the stories, discuss them, flag them, etc., and that would impact their popularity and how long they’d be featured.

Of course, none of that sounds revolutionary. It was basically just a description of Reddit. But, again, there was a time when that concept didn’t exist, and Rob Malda and Slashdot pioneered it. So why are platforms like Reddit and Twitter worth billions of dollars today and Slashdot isn't? That's what you're going to learn about in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

When you instant message someone -- using text, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, Slack, or any other instant messaging service -- you assume the person you're contacting will see your message soon because most people keeps their phones nearby and have quick access to the Internet. But that wasn't always the case.

In the early days of the Web, users weren't expected to be connected 24/7 like they are now. If you wanted to reach someone quickly, an instant message might not be the best choice if the person wasn't online. But how would you know?

That's the problem Barry Appelman solved when he created Buddy Lists inside of AOL. It was a way for users to know who among their connections was online and, if they were, message them instantly. The result became AOL Instant Messenger -- otherwise known as AIM -- the service that ushered in the age of instant messaging.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Who wrote the words you're reading right now? Someone, right? Some faceless human. But are you sure? What if these words were actually written by a computer? Would you know? Would you care?

Those are the questions we explore in this episode of Web Masters while talking with Robbie Allen, founding CEO of Automated Insights. Automated Insights began as a company called StatsSheet, Inc. that created automated game summaries and analysis for sporting events. But it evolved over time to become a technology company that automates online content creation for companies around the world. In fact, there's a good chances you've encountered some of their computer generated content while surfing the Web, and you didn't even realize it.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Despite the fact that magazine industry was one of the industries most likely to be hurt by the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, the company that led the charge for moving content online was, strangely enough, one of the biggest magazine publishers in the world: Time, Inc.

This episode of Web Masters features one of the people who helped drive that transition: Bruce Judson. Bruce ran the operational side of Time Warner's new media division in the early 1990s, and he and his team launched pathfinder.com. Pathfinder was a one of the early Web's most popular portals sites that allowed people to access part of the companies vast collection of magazine content.

Pathfinder didn't last long online, but, in its few short years, it made a huge contribution to the Web. Chief among those was in advertising, where Bruce and his team established many of the conventions for online advertising that are still followed today.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Club Penguin was a virtual world that its founder, Lane Merrifield, also describes as a social network. However, depending on your age, you might have never heard of it. That's because Club Penguin was for children. And it was enormously popular, having over 200 million registered users around the world at its peak.

So why did Lane and his team build Club Penguin? And what distinguishes a social network for children from other social networking websites? That's what we explore on this episode of Web Masters. Lane shares the story of building Club Penguin, starting with where the idea came from, through the company's eventual purchase by Disney for $350 million, and the experience of running the virtual world after the Disney acquisition.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The early Web was primarily a place for tech enthusiasts. However, as the Web expanded, tech culture increasingly began intersecting with pop culture. At the center of that intersection was FEED Magazine.

FEED was one of the Web's first daily publications to put media, pop culture, and art in conversation with science and technology. It developed a devoted following and was a leading voice in the Internet community while both promoting and critiquing the emerging digital age.

On this episode of Web Masters, we'll hear from tech entrepreneur and author Stefanie Syman, one of the founders of FEED. Stefanie shares the story of what it was like to launch and run a digital publication in the early days of the Web before publishing online was as simple as using a word processor, and before generating money from advertising was as simple as copy/pasting a line of code.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Some people stumble onto their startup ideas and become accidental entrepreneurs. That definitely wasn’t the case for Andrew. Andrew knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur, he just didn’t know what kind of company to build.

Andrew understood that the Internet was going to create lots of new entrepreneurial opportunities, but finding one that wasn't going to run into a lot of competition from existing offline businesses was a challenge. Eventually, Andrew recognized the Internet was going to create new opportunities for networking that hadn't previously existed. It was, in his words, an "inevitability."

Beating everyone else to the opportunity, in 1997, Andrew launched the Internet's first social networking website. He called it SixDegrees.com, and it was a place where people could connect with their networks and make new connections based on mutual friends.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The Domain Name System -- DNS -- is like the Internet's phone book. It's how computers match URLs to IP addresses in order to help you do things like look at web pages or send emails.

Sure, the system seems like an obvious way of structuring the Internet now. After all, can you imagine the Web without Google.com and Amazon.com and Facebook.com? But the current structure of Internet domain names wasn't always an obvious solution to the problem.

In this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear how the Domain Name System came into being from the man who invented DNS, Paul Mockapetris. Paul's vision for Internet routing was critical for making the Internet infinitely scalable. But, when he proposed it, he wasn't actually in a position to implement his vision. So, before his system could be adopted, he had to make sure nobody else's proposals were ever considered. Luckily, he was given a perfect opportunity to intervene.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.