Many of these business plans relied either on some type of transaction revenue in terms of ecommerce or more likely on an advertising revenue stream. There are many reasons individual businesses did not get off the ground or, if they achieved that, then why they subsequently failed. However, one thing that was clear at the time was that the aggregate of the ad revenue that such businesses were meant to be capturing was significantly in excess of what was available in the market to feed various types of media. Therefore, it was always a fair bet that many businesses were doomed to failure - and fail they did.
Notwithstanding those business failures, that period triggered the gradual shift of advertising revenue away from traditional media and content.
It also made many businessmen who were not previously aware of the potential for attracting advertising or sponsorship revenue to their businesses wake up to the opportunity.
For example, outdoor advertising has extended way beyond the simple billboard to any type of building signage; from the inside of elevators, to the inside of subway tunnels to the back of taxi receipts and so on. We have to also recognise that in some of the once over-heated property markets of Asia, property tycoons are now anxious to find other ways of maintaining revenue - picking up ad revenue is such a great way.
In addition to outdoor, there are other types of new venues for advertising, including, of course, mobile phones. This means that the advertiser is not lost for choice, but it does continue to provide challenges for agencies and also for the genuine creators of content.
For the agencies (both ad and PR), the economic challenge partially comes from the increasing trend of media owners by-passing agencies and going direct to the end advertiser, while the creative challenge is in terms of how to best use the new media to successfully get a message across in an innovative manner.
For the creator of content, the challenge is in terms of overall continued financial viability. What is of concern here is that the creation of content has often placed reliance, sometimes over-reliance, on support from advertisers, rather than on direct payment from the end consumer. There are many examples of this in the print sector.
The response to this has to be to identify ways in which to leverage the content over new platforms in order to recoup some of the lost ad revenue and to monetise the offering more directly from the consumer - this may be in the form of revenue sharing arrangements with the distributor.
An example of this would be with a telco with respect to SMS. For those in the world of content, it is certainly true that one is having to run very fast in order to even maintain existing market share.
The other implication from this ever-increasing fragmentation in advertising space is that we will inevitably see some further consolidation of ownership - perhaps that means the media barons are going to have to watch out for the property tycoons - in Hong Kong we already have examples of that.