Over the past few months I've noticed some very significant failures, cutbacks and withdrawals by content companies, telcos and other "new economy" businesses.

Regular readers will recall that I previously highlighted how Internet.com had dropped its NZ-centric site and that NewsLinx.com had scaled right back (due, I was told, to a failure of the ad-funded publishing model).

Now I see that TechWeb News isn't being updated (despite what the date says) - the newest story being posted on Monday.

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Then, a little closer to home, we see that Telemedia has gone belly-up, citing a significant downturn in the industry. Its receivership comes just days after the Australian telco One.Tel also turned turtle across the ditch.

Of course there are also those dim-witted Telcos that paid a king's ransom for 3GL spectrum allocations in Europe. It would appear that there is simply no way they will ever recover that money and it's also doubtful that many of the successful bidders will even be able to pay for what they've bought. Some analysts say this could see some rather bad company crashes in the Euro telco marketplace within a year.

Gone are the days of free Internet access, Napster is about to become a pay-to-use service, and its hard to find a content site that isn't at least giving a cursory consideration to introducing a subscription-based service.

Any hopes by online enterprises that they will be able to spin a buck from well targeted web-based advertising seem to have been all but destroyed by the feedback received from Aardvark's readers yesterday too.

So where are the Net and other "new economy" ventures headed?

Are we starting to experience the start of a sudden decline that will be every bit a match for the dot-com boom we saw at the end of the last decade?

Readers Say (updated hourly) From Yesterday... macro payments... - Dennis Ad-free content... - James pay for content... - John targeted advertising... - Tom macro payments... - bede user provided data... - Steven Dummy Profiles... - Tim Micropayments... - Jayne Have Your Say

You've got to be at least a little worried eh?

Bloody Ads!
While on the subject of web advertising -- is anyone else as annoyed as I am by those irritating "pop-under" ads that seem to becoming so popular?

Quite frankly I don't mind that some sites are using larger ads -- I can ignore them and they don't slow down my browsing because I leave my graphics off so I just see a black rectangle on the page.

But those pop-unders are a right royal PITA! They are the cyber-equivalent of the thick card inserts that you get in some magazines -- you know the ones.. they make it impossible to flick through the pages and cause the pages to constantly fall open at that point each time you put a magazine down.

I know there is software out there that will nuke these ads before they appear, but haven't advertisers learned that if they keep pissing people off it's not going to do their reputation or sales any good in the long term?

Of course there's the school of thought that says "there's no such thing as bad publicity" -- but if that's true, why aren't McDonalds advertising by wrapping bricks in their tray-menus and throwing the said bricks through living-room windows across the country?

No... there IS such a thing as going too far!

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