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Articles Index >> Marketing
A Brief Timeline of The Internet
by Michael Cheney
In 1992, the World Wide Web was released by CERN. In the same year the term
“surfing the Internet” was coined by Jean Armour Polly.
In 1993, the US White House and United Nations came online. So you can see
that although you may think the Internet has been around for a long time, it’s
really only been in existence since 1992.
In 1994, Pizza Hut first offered pizza ordering via its web page. This is one
of the first companies to truly recognize the potential and the opportunity
to do direct business with customers over the web. In the same year FirstVirtual
was the first cyber bank to open its doors to business.
In 1995 there were around 100 thousand websites in existence which, thinking
about that today, sounds like a ridiculously low figure.
It was only in 1996 that Google first developed its engine. The guys behind
the Google search engine were Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Since then they have
obviously gone on to make millions and millions through their search engine
Google.com.
By 1997 there were one million websites in existence. You can see that in just
two years there had been a ten-fold increase in the number of websites.
A lot of you may have heard of PayPal, the commercial clearing house. Well,
PayPal was only founded in 1998, so it hasn’t actually been around that
long.
If we zoom forward to 2005, there are over eight billion web pages listed on
Google. As you can see with this quick timeline to the Internet, things are
moving very, very quickly and this pace only seems set to continue.
The good news for you as a website owner is that more and more people are getting
online. Not only that, but people are spending more and more cash online with
each year. Business to consumer retailing revenues, in the US alone, for the
year 2004 were 141 billion dollars. In 2005, they are set to be 172 billions
dollars.
Year on year these numbers look set to increase as more people become familiar
with the Internet and actually start buying and selling products online. The
increasing online population and take up of the Internet amongst the consumer
population means the opportunity for you as a business owner, to actually generate
revenue through your internet website, becomes greater.
And one of the best things about being in business on the Internet is that
you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can copy existing success models
of other website owners and learn from their mistakes and successes.
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