It would be a perfect market, just like you might find in an economics textbook. Anyone could put up something for sale, anyone could place a bid, and the item went to the highest bidder. “I wanted to do something different,” Omidyar later recalled, “to give the individual the power to be a producer as well as a consumer.” This was the motivation for the website he built in September 1995. Their efforts at commercialisation weren’t just crude and uncool, they also promoted a zombie-like passivity – look here, click here, enter your credit card number here – that threatened the participatory nature of the internet he knew. The corporations clambering on to the internet saw people as nothing more than “wallets and eyeballs”, he later told a journalist. He now observed the rising flood of dot-com money with some concern. He had been a devoted user of the internet since his undergraduate days, and a participant in its various communities. Omidyar was fond of this form of online life. They made homepages simply to say hello, to post pictures of their pets, to share their enthusiasm for Star Trek. People were excited to be there, despite there being relatively little for them to do. Most of the sites that did exist were hideous and barely usable.īut the smallness and slowness of the early web also lent it a certain charm. And there wasn’t much content to find: only 23,500 websites existed in 1995, compared to more than 17m five years later. Finding content was tricky: you could wander from one site to another by following the tissue of hyperlinks that connected them, or page through the handmade directory produced by Yahoo!, the preferred web portal before the rise of the modern search engine. The internet may have been attracting millions of newcomers – there were nearly 45 million users in 1995, up 76% from the year before – but it wasn’t particularly user-friendly. If the internet of 1995 inspired dreams of a lucrative future, the reality ran far behind. The dot-com bubble was starting to inflate. By the end of the first day of trading, the company was worth almost $3bn – despite being unprofitable. The following month, Netscape, creator of the most popular web browser, held its initial public offering (IPO). In July, a former investment banker named Jeff Bezos launched an online storefront called, which claimed to be “Earth’s biggest bookstore”. In May 1995, Bill Gates had circulated a memo at Microsoft announcing that the internet was the company’s top priority. The idea for this particular project would be simple: a website where people could buy and sell.īuying and selling was still a relatively new idea online. But in his spare time, he liked to tinker with side projects on the internet. Now he worked for a company that made software for handheld computers, which were widely expected to be the next big thing. At 28, Pierre Omidyar had followed the standard accelerated trajectory of Silicon Valley: he had learned to code in seventh grade, and was on track to becoming a millionaire before the age of 30, after having his startup bought by Microsoft. One weekend in September 1995, a software engineer made a website.
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