2007: The year dot.com insanity returned

Posted by N Azam as Business, N Azam

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The dot.com bubble returned in 2007. They say, as human beings, we never learn and this year I read more nonsense about the internet than at any time since 2001.

Sure, there are some sound enterprises which are earning real money and many others which are wisely investing in the future, but if you look beyond the fancy Web 2.0 logos and domain names for a second and investigate the net earnings and business plans of many internet businesses, you realise the Emperor neither has nor will ever be able to afford any clothes.

Facebook may be ‘worth’ $15 Billion, but it has yet to make a penny in profit. Other web companies may boast about having 60 or 70 staff, but they are making less profit than my affiliate buddies who slog away on their own.

AGLOCO was another hair-brained dot.com bubble two scheme that went to the wall One of the year’s most hyped ‘Web 2.0′ businesses was AGLOCO, which has 9,670,000,000 references to it in Google. Just a few days back, on 10 December, it sent a Dear John email to its hundreds of thousands of members saying it had gone to the wall.

While it claimed to be “the first Internet based economic network, which enables you as a Member to ‘Get your share of the internet.’ Advertisers” it was little different to the Get Paid to Surf programs such as AllAdvantage which plagued the internet several years earlier and proved to be spectacular failures.

UK residents: hurry here to get your free gifts this Christmas before it's too late. Click on 'Free Products' at the top-right of the landing page you see

Sadly, many of the so-called dot.com entrepreneurs who have come online in the last few years have never heard of the likes of AllAdvantage and spent the year ballyhooing AGLOCO and blogging about having tens of thousands of members in their downline. I stayed clear of AllAdvantage in 1999 and am glad I did not waste a second of my time dancing with her equally puerile younger sibling AGLOCO in 2007. That AGLOCO means “it’s on fire, people” in Hindi was sufficient grounds for me to stay clear.

Right, I’m off to work on our new comparison shopping site/affiliate network/social networking portal, but I suppose we might as well enjoy Boom 2.0 while it lasts and I’ll leave you with this video: