Web Masters

Unless you’re an Internet history buff, you’ve probably never heard of NetGravity. However, NetGravity is, in some ways, one of the most important startups in Internet history. It was the first Internet advertising company. Considering much of the Internet these days relies on advertising, being the company that started the online advertising industry is… well… kind of a big deal.

The advantage of being first in an important market like Internet advertising is that, in the early days, all the biggest and best customers don't have any other options. That was true for NetGravity. Launched in 1995, NetGravity quickly gobbled up most of the world's most popular Internet companies as their customers, including companies like Yahoo!, Netscape, and Time Warner. NetGravity's explosive growth led to an early entry into the public markets and a rapid rise in valuation.

At the same time, John and the NetGravity team soon found themselves battling competitors who were taking a different -- and more lucrative -- approach to online advertising.

In this episode of Web Masters, hear the full story of how NetGravity defended its position as the market leader, pivoted to stay relevant, and ultimately achieved a successful exit.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Computers looked very different in the 1960s. Most obviously, people weren’t able to slip them into their pockets. Instead, computers were room-sized machines. And even those enormous machines had only a fraction of the computing power you use when you’re scrolling through Instagram on your phone.

Still, computers in the 1960s were great at processing large datasets. And a young Harvard undergraduate named Jeff Tarr saw a unique way to use that processing power. While most researchers were turning to computers to compile things like economic data, engineering data, medical data, and aeronautical data, Jeff decided to use computers to process personal relationship data.

Jeff sent surveys filled with relationship questions to students at college campuses around the country. Anyone who filled out his survey and sent it back along with $3 was guaranteed at least six “matches” -- contact info for someone nearby to invite on a date.

After his first mailing, Jeff received 7,800 completed surveys with over $23,000 in 1960s money -- roughly equivalent to $200,000 today -- and he knew he was onto something big. And while he might not have known it at the time, he was laying the foundation for what would become the online dating industry.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Online dating was an early part of the Web. But, to Sam Yagan and his friends, it was broken. The industry leaders were all thinking about it the wrong way because they were trying to create matches for users.

The OkCupid team didn't think people needed help finding matches. They thought people just needed help finding more potential mates to choose from, so that's what they focused on.

Growth was slow at first, but, once they found the right formula -- by developing a series of strategies that have now become standard growth "best practices" across countless industries -- OkCupid took off. It eventually became one of the most popular dating websites in the world and has helped millions of people find their own soulmates.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart created the first ebook by digitizing a copy of the US Declaration of Independence and sharing it on ARPANET, precursor to the Internet. He'd go on to launch an ambitious project to digitize as many (public domain) books as possible.

Unfortunately, Michael passed away in 2011, but his legacy lives on through Greg Newby. Greg is the CEO of the not-profit Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, Inc., which oversees Project Gutenberg and has helped grow it into a collection of over 62,000 ebooks that have been digitized and curated by volunteers. Every ebook is freely downloadable on the Project Gutenberg website, making it the oldest digital resource library in the world.

While Greg didn't start Project Gutenberg, he's been instrumental in its growth and global success. In this episode of Web Masters, he shares the story of how he got involved, how it's grown, and how it impacts and will continue impacting the world for generations to come.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In the earliest days of the public Internet, if you wanted personal, at-home access, you were going to have to pay… a lot. That’s because early Internet service providers (ISPs) would charge people based on how long they were online.

For Ron Burr, these costs were more than just a money issue. Sure, Internet access was expensive, but, to him, there was another problem. He didn’t understand how people could charge so much money for something they didn’t actually own.

Recognizing this strange relationship between Internet access and Internet ownership, Ron and his co-founders started wondering if they could find some way of subsidizing the cost. Could they figure out a way to give free Internet access to everyone?

They didn’t have to look far for their business model. Radio and broadcast TV had been doing the same thing for years, and they were doing it by leveraging advertising. That led them to the idea for NetZero, the revolutionary ISP that gave free Internet access in exchange for showing you ads while you browsed.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The Internet is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget the network didn't spring into being, fully formed, as a global connectivity paradigm. But, of course, that's not the case. Our collective journey toward having the Internet (almost) everywhere was a slow process that took decades.

Part of the reason the Internet took so long to spread was cultural. While, today, people take things like email and instant messaging for granted, that wasn’t always the case. Even though most of us couldn’t effectively operate in our day-to-day lives without email, that type of digital dependency is a learned behavior. For thousands of years, humans survived perfectly well without it, and convincing us we needed our email accounts attached to our hips at all times took a while.

That began to change thanks to Ira Fuchs and BITNET. BITNET played a critical role in convincing people they needed networked computers. And, like most computer innovation at the time, it began at universities.

When Ira started BITNET, his goal was to “connect the scholars of the world.” He launched it in 1981 with a connection between the City University of New York -- CUNY -- and Yale University. Within months, Ira had connected major institutions up and down the eastern United States. Soon thereafter he’d expanded to the West Coast. Within two years of launching, BITNET was in Europe, then the Middle East, Japan, and, eventually, even into Soviet Russia, making BITNET the global computer network that preceded the Internet.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

These days, kids grow up sharing everything about their personal lives in an effort to become Instagram influencers and TikTok famous. They don't know it, but their dreams of social media stardom were pioneered in the mid 1990s by a teenager who wasn't looking for celebrity status. His name was Justin Hall, and sharing his personal story online was, for him, less about notoriety and more a way to connect with people.

Justin ran a popular website called Links From The Underground -- Links.net -- with a huge collection of interesting links from around the Web. As Links.net got more popular, Justin decided he also wanted to tell his visitors a bit more about himself and his own life. Soon, he'd built a massive collection of stories and posts about his daily activities, and people were visiting his site as much to read about him as they were to discover his link collection. This turned Justin into one of the world's first and most popular personal bloggers as he became a pioneer of the online influencer industry.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Since you’ve found this podcast, it’s safe to assume you have Internet access. Prior to using whatever device you're going to listen, did you spend any time thinking about how to connect to the Internet? You probably didn’t, and a big reason you didn’t is because the Internet has mostly become a basic utility thanks to entrepreneurs like Sky Dayton.

Sky created EarthLink, one of the most popular early Internet Service Providers. It helped to get an estimated 10% of the US population online.

Even though accessing the Internet has largely become equivalent to accessing water from a tap, it wasn’t always like that. In fact, this was exactly the problem that led Sky to Earthlink. In the early 90s, when the Internet was first opening to the general public, Sky wanted to explore it himself. He found an early internet service provider -- ISP -- in southern California, but getting his computer connected took him nearly a week. Frustrated by the challenge, Sky spent the first part of his career helping others solve the same problem.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

For most people, social media is part of the fabric of modern day life. But do you know where digital social media started?

It wasn’t Facebook. Facebook launched in 2004, which was decades after computer networking began. MySpace, it’s well-known predecessor, only launched a few months earlier in 2003.

Some people might point to Friendster, which began in 2002. And, before that, back in 1997, there was a website called Six Degrees. Its creator actually filed the first patents for social networking. However, even Six Degrees wasn’t the first digital social network.

In 1979, more than a decade before Tim Berners Lee launched the World Wide Web, and even before the modern Internet existed, two graduate students at Duke University released a piece of software that would connect people and communities around the world via computers and their modems. That software was called Usenet, and it was the world’s first globally popular, digital social network.

Learn how Usenet got started and how it changed the world on this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Even if you haven’t heard of DoubleClick, you’ve certainly been impacted by it. DoubleClick basically invented Internet advertising as we know it. Their ad servers powered much of the early days of Web advertising. Eventually Google bought DoubleClick, and its core technologies were deeply integrated into Google’s ad network, meaning there’s a good chance DoubleClick’s ad serving platform is impacting you in some way literally this second.

Considering DoubleClick’s revolutionary impact on advertising, most people would expect that DoubleClick's founder, Kevin O'Connor, came up with the idea for DoubleClick based on years of experience in the advertising industry. But that’s actually not the case. Kevin was a coder.

How does someone who knows nothing about advertising come up with the idea for a revolutionary ad tech platform? That's what you'll learn about in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.