The other group that was discovering the Web on an entrepreneurship level consisted of the media entrepreneurs. And this was logical because again, every major platform shift in media also has given rise to many great content companies, although those shifts are much fewer and further between. You have radio, TV, recorded music, cable, film and, before that, Guttenberg. There was a ravenous audience for that opportunity, and you had content-oriented companies like Hotwired and CNet, and you had a lot of major media companies like Time Warner also getting on very early. The thing that we all missed that had to take off in a quality way in order for the Web to become relevant to a mass market was a search and directory.
Content is king only when it is rare, scarce, and expensive.
When content is infinite and free, which is what happens on the Web, context becomes king. Two months before Netscape went public with a multi-billion dollar market cap and hundreds of employees, Yahoo was still two kids in a trailer. They definitely were there, they mattered, they had an audience, they had a great deal of traffic and the beginning of a brand, but they had no business ideas, no business plan, no venture capital, no idea of where the money was going to come from. Essentially, directories really happened late. Although Yahoo was out there very early, it was very late in the game before any directory got off the ground.