Early in the days of the World Wide Web, from around 1990-2000 with the widespread adoption of the internet came a time of excessive speculation. Many companies began investing into the internet. This became known as the “Dot-com Bubble.” Though many companies struck gold with the rise of the internet such as Google, many other companies lost big, as is common with investing into unknown markets.
To this day investors have continued to pour money into risky and unproven media ventures. When it comes to things like internet infrastructures and social media outlets, investors have a chance to gain exponential growth in a short amount of time. A company like Facebook which is now incredibly successful at one point just a biproduct of something completely new. After the success of Facebook many other companies tryed to get in on the social media pie. Google another majorly successful company tryed to compete with Facebook directly with Google Plus. Its a safe assumption that they invested quite a lot of time and money into the project, but most people would consider the Google Plus platform a failure.
If you step back and look at the services that are available on the internet, free or paid, you can begin to notice a trend. Typically, in a given field there is a “top-dog” product. For example, within the field of online video sharing, YouTube is at the top with the most users and widespread adoption. Other companies who want in on the online video sharing market have to go up against an already proven product. This means that a company has to invest more time and money if they are serious about being a competitor with another companies product.
In conclusion, the reason why companies tend to invest so much in unproven and risky media ventures is because should they be successful, it will become very difficult for another company to steal their thunder. I think that this is a very good thing for consumers because it encourages true innovation, and improvement. For a company to be successful with a media service, they have to listen to their users. If people dont like a new policy or change, their exist other platforms that do the same thing that they can use. For example many people who dislike YouTube for live streaming have began to favor Amazons alternative platform Twitch.
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