Error 402: Exploring The Little Understood History Of Online Monetization

Business Models

from the a-historical-exploration dept

I realized recently that I had now passed 30 years on the internet, having obtained my first internet access in August of 1993 — the same year that many consider to be the year that the internet became commercial. That was back when you had to obtain access to the internet, rather than just… having internet access around you at all times. I’ve lived through a decent amount of internet history, and sometimes that makes me forget that other people have not.

For example, I’ve followed most of the trajectory of how people try (sometimes successfully, often not) to make money off of content online. I’m not ashamed to admit that the first time I spent money online was logging into a telnet server to purchase some music, and sharing my credit card in a manner that I can guarantee you was not secure (though, amazingly, nothing bad happened, as credit card scams really didn’t hit the internet in any major way until much later).

However, over the last few months and years, I’ve noticed a pattern of people talking to me about ideas on monetization who seem unaware of many of the things that have come before, including what worked and what absolutely did not. That is not to say, of course, that things that failed in the past will ultimately fail again. The internet is littered with stories of ideas and concepts that failed once when they were too early, but succeeded wildly when the time was right. But, still, it’s important to understand why things failed if you’re hoping to do it correctly this time.

So, this new series (which was conceived of over a year ago, but is finally getting started now) is going to explore the past, present and (hopefully?) future of monetization online, looking at how people on the internet have made money — and how they’ve failed to make money over the past three decades.

My hope is that in going through this history and examining the different elements of what works, it will help many creators and entrepreneurs better think through strategies themselves for how to make money online, how to provide services for helping others make money online, and how to best support the online creators whose work you most appreciate. Hopefully, this new series may inspire others to come up with better ways that help enable more creators to be able to keep creating online in a manner that works for everyone.

Nothing about this series is designed to present the “right” way of doing things. In fact, much of it is about situational differences that explore why some concepts work for some users at some times in some places, and others don’t. But it is designed to explore the various ideas and concepts, and how the idea of monetization itself online has changed over time as the technology and culture have changed.

The plan is to drop a new article in this series each week for a few months. While we have a full outline planned, along with a few initial articles, I fully expect that we’ll hear from people and learn something new as we go as well, leading me to add in new stories and new articles, beyond the initial outline.

As for the name of the series — Error 402 — that comes from one of the initial list of HTTP errors that were created in the early days of the World Wide Web, Error 402: Payment Required. You’re probably already familiar with Error 404: Not Found, and maybe even Error 403: Forbidden, but almost no one I know is aware of Error 402. And, that’s mainly because it was never implemented.

The early developers of the web came up with this list of errors, including 402, contemplating that monetization would be built in to the web as a core bit of functionality. And then… they didn’t. Things got pretty busy and pretty crazy pretty fast. And money was flying all over the place, and somehow… the core concept of monetization got left behind for everyone to just figure out.

So, let’s dig in and figure it out.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention in a series on monetization that Techdirt has been in existence for over 25 years, in part, because some of you help to pay to keep the lights on here. And there are many different ways that you can help to keep us going in the future (many of which may make appearances later in this series). And, on that note, I also need to thank the wonderful folks at the Interledger Foundation and Grant for the Web for the initial funding to put together this series, as they’re trying to better think through what the future of web monetization looks like as well.

Filed Under: history, monetization, the internet