By 2002 the survivors stopped talking about eyeballs and started talking about revenue.
After the crash, always-on broadband spread into homes and a sober second wave of the web, real businesses with real customers, began to form. Above Mars, 2001 Mars Odyssey began mapping the planet and searching for evidence of water.
2002 was a hangover year, and hangovers are clarifying. The companies still standing had stopped talking about eyeballs and page views and started talking about the boring things: customers, revenue, whether the numbers actually worked.
Broadband was creeping into homes, always on, and it quietly changed what you could build. Something that assumed a permanent connection was no longer a fantasy.
I found I liked this weather better than the mania. When the easy money is gone, the only people left are the ones who actually wanted to build the thing. Those are the only people worth working with anyway.
FILL: what you were building in these post-crash years.