It boggles my mind when I hear people saying that the Internet is becoming increasingly corporatized or that only large enterprises can succeed on the Internet. Personally, I think large enterprises will always have a place on the Internet, but the playing field is as level in cyberspace as it probably can be. (I have a strong suspicion that many of the people who make this claim don’t spend too much time actually surfing a large number of sites, so they aren’t clued in to just how wide open things are on the Web).
The major reason I moved to a dedicated server solution was that my sites were becoming victims of their own success. I started my first web site in 1996 thinking I’d create a web newspaper that would compete with the print newspaper at the university where I was a student. That flopped — Internet access wasn’t ubiquitous enough at that time — but one thing led to another and four years later I’m amazed at the number of people I reach.
The short version is that in 1997, the first full year these sites were on the web, people accessed about 171,000 pages on my site. For 2000, we’ll probably serve up about 4 million pages, and at the current rate of growth (which will continue to increase, if anything), we’ll hit the 1 million pages views per month level in a year or two and my site revenues will double my current salary (I’m never going to get rich doing this, but the site already more than pays for itself and helps to pay the rent). Not bad for someone working in his spare time.
The really cool thing, however, is the people I’ve met online. I’ve provided reporters with background information on topics, helped countless students with research projects, and established active friendships with many of the experts and nationally known figures in my areas of interest — most of whom I would never have talked to without the web.