These were the elite sites on the Web that functioned as choke points for traffic because they offered content and services that were either essential for practical reasons or compelling for divergent ones. For everyone else, however, the model did not hold up. For most players, advertising just was not a business. E-commerce referred to the practice of selling real products for real money through online channels. It is hard to make up those losses in volume.
Examples are abundant.
The investment is in customer relationships, and harvest time is yet to come. There is hardly an airline that runs a frequent flyer program or a credit card issuer that depends on card use for profits that does not know, and explicitly recognize, the profit potential of an enterprise of retained, and increasingly loyal, target-market customers. Monetizing traffic is a fancy term for converting customer satisfaction and loyalty at a Web site into a commercially viable, and even attractive, long-term relationship between customer and brand. What awaits us is the perhaps deflating realization that, Internet company valuations aside, e-commerce is just, when all is said and done, another kind of business. There will be no magic bullet.