Back To 1995

   Chapter 724 Pies fall from the sky

  Bob Weiss browsed his own portal website. Lycos is now America, and even one of the global Internet portal giants. Although the brand is not as big as Yahoo!

  Lycos is backed by a group of European giants, including Bertelsmann, Bell Canada, Telefonica, etc., who went to America to cut leeks.

   In America, Lycos users, mainly the 30 million Spanish-speaking users, are also developing quite well in Europe.

Looking at it now, Lycos has met the requirements of the major shareholders behind it. After the listing of America, it has already cut several leeks in a row. Investing in Bertelsmann and other companies behind Lycos has already earned back dozens or hundreds of times. income!

The news on the Lycos website was just sent back from the domain name auction site held by DoubleClick. Now the Internet industry also has some signs of volume. In the original Internet portal, the speed of publishing news is basically faster than the media speed. .

Now it's different. Several major portals have also begun to roll up inward, and they all start to publish all kinds of big news first to attract attention and compete for users' click-through rate and traffic. After all, traffic is a beautiful knife. Whether an Internet company is valuable or not depends on how much traffic it can attract. Traffic is king!

   The news this time is the real-time news sent by the reporter of the Lycos website, who went to the auction site to send back!

A broken domain name is to bring a TV, which is read as the website of the TV, and sold for 110 million US dollars. If it is not reported by his own website, Bob Weiss will doubt whether someone is making up fake news for entertainment. he.

   The price of 110 million US dollars seems scary, but the party who took the photo and obtained the TV domain name is the right to use it for ten years, that is, the annual rental fee of more than 10 million US dollars.

   For future generations, if you spend tens of millions or even hundreds of millions for a domain name, the outside world can understand it. After all, this is the facade. Domain names and URLs are the skyscrapers of the Internet industry.

   can be placed now, at such a price, just to win a domain name, this is another spiritual shock for countless people.

This time, Al Jazeera, in the hands of a number of Internet companies and media giants, obtained the right to use this domain name. The gold master really has a family and an oil field!

Al Jazeera, which has just been established for two years, has always wanted to show its presence and become one of the world's first-class TV stations. Now, with 100 million US dollars, it has attracted the attention of global media and users, and has made headlines in major media. For this Tuhao TV station, is it too special to make money?

All the bidders in other auction venues can only reluctantly shy away in the face of such a pure money-spending master. Even Disney's ABC TV station, as well as TV station giants such as Fox and CNN, also want to get this domain name. It's not that they can't see the popularity of the Internet media, but helpless, the rival TV station this time is really too rich, and they don't use US knives as money.

   "After the Tuvalu domain name auction is completed, the Tuvalu region will receive an annual income of 3.4 million US dollars, becoming the first place in the world to earn income from Internet domain names, and the per capita income will be more than 300 US dollars!"

Bob Weiss saw that the American Internet Society also issued an announcement, announcing that the proceeds from the auction of domain names would still be distributed to Tuvalu. For Tuvalu, which has a population of only more than 10,000 people , more than three million dollars, equivalent to one-tenth of Tuvalu's annual GDP...

And then on the Tuvalu side, they seemed to be afraid that the American Internet Society would regret it. After all, this money is really "pie that fell from the sky". They didn't do anything, and they didn't even know what the domain name was, because this domain name, The American Internet Society, which "registered" for Tuvalu a few years ago, now gets millions of dollars every year. Isn't it just like money falling from the sky?

Tuvalu, who got the money, was afraid of being asked to go back again, so he quickly announced the use plan, including building several schools, repairing synagogues, churches, fishing boats, etc., and the most important thing is to pay membership dues to the United Nations !

Once Tuvalu has paid the membership dues to the United Nations, it will become the 189th member state of the United Nations. It doesn't matter whether the site is 30 kilometers long or not, whether it will be flooded by sea water in a few years, and now the membership fee is 1 Jiao, nominally, they are on an equal footing with the overlord of America...

   In other words, double-click a domain name auction held to directly auction a new United Nations member!

When Bob Weiss saw these news, he could imagine how excited the major media would be when they saw these news. The newly released domain name auction and the Internet appeared in the real world for the first time. The huge auction fee and the birth of new United Nations members, all these factors are combined, enough for the major media to report a wave of carnival!

   Looking at the news in front of him, Bob Weiss couldn't help recalling the banquet that proposed the establishment of the American Internet Society and the establishment of a domain name business a few years ago.

   At that time, it was a banquet to celebrate the listing of DoubleClick, and Song Yang suddenly proposed that an American Internet Association should be established in name, of course, for the better development of the Internet industry and to prevent Internet companies from being unfairly treated.

   And Bob Weiss and others all know that the establishment of the American Internet Society is a division of power in the Internet industry. Whoever controls the American Internet Society is the most powerful person in Silicon Valley!

Of course, the Internet Society proposed by Song Yang has done a lot of things. The most important thing is to promote the passage of Bill 230 on Capitol Hill, which is recognized by the global Internet industry as the birthplace of Internet giants. Fundamentally, with this "Gold Medal for the Internet Industry", no one can do anything to Internet companies.

   After proposing the establishment of the American Internet Society, Song Yang at the banquet, the second thing he established was to ask the American Internet Society to establish a domain name business and register, acquire, and hoard domain names all over the world.

Bob Weiss was still at the banquet at the time and asked Song Yang, what is the use of hoarding these domain names, and every year they have to spend a sum of money to manage them. Companies that dare to abuse these domain names in lawsuits, after all, Lycos, have to pay them every year. The Internet Society of America, Inc. pays a membership fee.

   At that time, Song Yang faced Bob Weiss' questioning, and his answer was very high-level, which can be called the Internet industry version.

Song Yang claimed that the purpose of hoarding these domain names is to make the Internet industry develop better, and to allow more places and users to enjoy the changes brought about by the Internet, and even allow more ordinary people to realize wealth because of the Internet. free!

   Of course, the people who heard this, including Bob Weiss, felt a little bit of a bullshit. Basically, the left ear went in and the right ear went out. If you don’t say it, you don’t believe it. Basically, you don’t care about it at all.

But now, a domain name auction has created a member of the United Nations. In the future, these domain names will bring huge profits to many places and people. It is almost conceivable that Tuvalu is only the first lucky one, but as long as With the first, there will be a second...

Thinking back to Song Yang's words at the banquet, Bob Weiss had mixed feelings for a while, and he didn't know how he felt. It was as if someone was bragging, but now, the bull who bragged at the beginning, have become reality.

What makes Bob Weiss silent the most is Song Yang's investment vision. Song Yang can be said to be the first person in the Internet industry to take a fancy to domain name investment. Now, it seems to prove once again that Song Yang's investment vision .

  Bob Weiss has a complicated expression. He doesn't know if someone like Song Yang is in the same industry and in the same era, whether he is lucky or just a little bit unlucky.

Double-click the first domain name auction. A total of 213 million US dollars was sold, of which Tuvalu’s domain name accounted for half of the turnover. Just as lucky as Tuvalu, there is also a small island country called Niue. Xiaodao, which earns 10 million to 20 million dollars a year, also receives 1.5 million dollars in domain name fees every year.

Double-clicking this domain name auction, all kinds of gimmicks came together, and with the media's help, this domain name auction was hotly hyped. As soon as the auction ended, it was covered by major media. The gimmick was really There are too many. Is it okay to sell a UN member state in an auction?

  The parties involved are all satisfied, companies that bought domain names at high prices, and took advantage of the popularity to make their fame even higher. This is their purpose!

   The double-click of the auction domain name and the American Internet Society, it is not a loss, this wave, double-click to collect fees, can receive more than ten million dollars, this is a long-term business, and it will not be a problem for decades!

   And places like Tuvalu and Niue were equally happy and got a windfall out of thin air. They never thought that one day, they would be able to eat just by their name...

Song Yang has nothing to worry about about Double-click. The businesses that Double-click is currently playing are all things that are as stable as old dogs. It seems that there are no other Internet companies making huge profits, but they can be stable and have a lot of money for decades. No problem at all.

Maybe when other Internet colleagues of the same era disappear into the long river of history, they will be regretted by others, and when they appear in the memory news of major media, double-clicks can pop up from time to time, show their sense of existence, and act as the Internet industry. " Living Fossil"!

   (end of this chapter)