The year was 1999, and I was a fresh-faced 24-year-old who'd finally gotten a real job in a real agency, after two years of freelance web development from home. I'd taken a job at APS Advertising, a creative boutique based in the WAFI Residences, and the first task given to me by my boss was the development of a report on the Internet so that he and his associates could better understand what to make of this "Internet thing." And so I dived in headfirst, trying to bring some structure and understanding to a job that I had until then done on pure guesswork. It was my first time interacting with other agencies, leading portals and the future of the Internet. While cleaning out my room the other day, I found a copy of the document I had written, and it offers a fascinating insight into a world that seems to long ago, and so different from the Internet we have today. Some interesting highlights
- There were 52.000 Internet users in the UAE, and 58,000 in a the combined Bahrain/KSA market
- Online ad spend in the Middle East was $120,000
- Dubai-online.com and godubai.com were leading local portals
- The top 3 portals in the world were yahoo.com, go.com and excite.com
You can download a PDF copy of my report here. It would be nice to hear from any of the other "old dogs" of the industry on the changes they've seen since they got into the online scene
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Comments
Payam March 3, 2008 at 02:38 am
very interesting report, Yousef! would you happen to be working on a new report showing the differences between now and then?
Shuja Shabandri February 27, 2008 at 07:51 pm
It was 1999 when most of my friends at MSRIT, Bangalore were bunking classes to play snooker or basketball, i would be sitting at a internet cafe trying out HTML in notepad...How boring....
Designed my first website for a friend in MS Paint and notepad. Can you believe it????, then i came accross netscape composer, frontpage and later dreamweaver. I remember programming my first website in ASP for my community and i did it in 3 days with only 2 -3 hours of sleep each day. I had no idea there was a WHERE clause in SQL, i would just loop through the entire recordsets to match the right record. So the website with Articles, News, Forum, Poll was programmed completely from scratch with such stupid code.
IRC was hot and so was ICQ (at least in India). I can still remember my ICQ number even though i have not used it for past 7 years.
And those pages with black background on tripod and geocities (hot free hosting sites) with animated gifs of fire and cartoons were all over the place and seemed like a standard for personal pages.
Angela February 6, 2008 at 08:16 pm
remember when you would have to pay per minute online?
*sigh* how far we've come....
Iyad Tibi February 3, 2008 at 07:48 pm
Tell me about these days!!!
I remember I did my first website when I was 17 years old. It was an armature website about the \\\"Dodge Viper\\\" using FrontPage! And it got featured in some famous Arab internet magazine that I used to read by then. I can\\\'t remember the magazine\\\'s name but it was doing a pretty good job in tracking online related activities and business in the Arab world.
In 1999, I was around 18 and I got involved in some actual work with my father’s company. Projects were for clients like Dubai’s Chamber of Commerce, Ministry of Tourism and some other Big Hotels like JB in late 2001, I got exposed to lots of interesting ideas not only in Online but in Digital Media as well, I can tell you that the acceptance for such ideas and new media were not that interesting. I guess you can turn that to the lack of online knowledge and internet reach at that time :)
Sam February 3, 2008 at 06:21 pm
Nice one YTT
I remember I stared my career with dinesh in 1998,
I got my first hotmail ID in 1998. Design first website in 1999, days of 640x480 screen resolutions. After 10 years still learning…
Mandy February 3, 2008 at 04:47 pm
I got into internet way back in \'95 by doing a brief course on HTML as an introduction - I was hooked, but didn\'t get a fully-fledged \"web\" job until 2000. It\'s interesting that back in 1999, the standardisation of browsers was an issue which was expected to be addressed and fixed - but I\'m sure no one expected it would still be dogging the industry 8.5 years on! And what a pleasure... no mention of the evils: spam or viruses. So where\'s Google? It was just building momentum in 1999. Truly a good read - thanks :)
Saif Diwan February 3, 2008 at 04:02 pm
I came to know about Internet and WWW in 2000. I was in the last yr of my college and I wanted to get into part-time job in vacations. I read a newspaper ad in \'Situations Vacant\' section of Mid-Day. Mid-day is, even today, any college student\'s poison. It used to cost 2 bucks and its one and only thing with a resale value.
Anyway, I came accross an ad which said, \"Wanted Internet Executives\". This was something new for me to read. I was called for the interview and was rejected on the following point:
1. I didnt know what were search engines. (Popular was Yahoo)
The interviewer told me to understand what is Yahoo Search Engine and get back to him in a week time. I got the offer and got the designation of Internet Customer Support Executive. And they put me on Hotmail project. Hotmail was damn popular and any individual\'s 1st email account used to be on Hotmail as compared to Yahoo or Excite or USA.net. I still have the same email account which I had registered in the year 2000. And as Martin said, SME\'s used to have their email accounts on Hotmail, we use to close such accounts because you cannot use Hotmail account as a business account. We used to send one warning mail, and then close the accounts. I used to love that. Later, after one month\'s time, I was moved to another project, Webhelp. They had a beautiful concept. They had developed a chat aplication which we used to use to chat with the customers. The idea was, respond to the customers\' queries and SEARCH relevant information for them. People used to subscribe for the service. We used to use the free version of Copernic and Kateisoft as the tools. Copernic is a search tool which pulls information from various search engines and directories and kateisoft was a multi-frame web browser. We used to put the keywords in Copernic and drag those links in katiesoft and send the relevant link to the customers.
People are still not aware how that thing used to work, but they used to say, Webhelp is SMART. And today, we all know Google and web and www. Even a 5 year old kid goes to Google and types the keyword and get what he/she wants.
Martin February 3, 2008 at 03:14 pm
Hilarious. When I moved to the Middle East in 2001, I remember that most of my clients where using COMPANYNAME@hotmail.com as their main email address. \\\"Please pass on to digital marketing manager\\\" used to read every subject line.
And pretty much all portals used to cheat on their impression delivery hiding 20 banner codes in tags or in chat applications.
And most importantly, my ex-boss at a well known Dubai agency was trying hard to convince people like me, Dee & Ash to become a THROUGH THE LINE agency. We thought different, and became truly digital boys and girls ;-)
Mazen February 3, 2008 at 02:34 pm
Dude...
Great stuff!
This is the real thing indeed.
Were you cleaning your room or your time machine?
Cheers.