10 Years of eMarketing Awesomeness

By Tim Shier on 2009/02/25

The Internet is the ultimate by-product of technological evolution and the last 10 years have seen some of the most aggressive growth and evolution of any system, undoubtedly, in all of existence.

This has presented a number of opportunities for marketers to better engage their communities and for communities to interact with brands. No matter how you look at it the last 10 years have been fascinating. To celebrate our 10 year Quirk-A-Versary as well as the last 10 years of Internet awesomeness, I've put together a list of the major events which have influenced how and why we eMarketers do what we do.

1998:

  • Technically, this timeline should only begin in 1999, but this monumental year of the Internet deserves a special mention. In August of 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google using their unique Page Rank system to deliver superior results to its users.

1999:

  • In March of this year, Quirk eMarketing was founded (then known as Quirk Business Solutions) by a crazy student called Rob Stokes. Think back and you'll also remember it for being the year of Y2K anxiety.
  • It was around this time that Search Engine Optimisation really became an active interest with WebMasters who began carefully manipulating pages to ensure the highest rankings for their sites. The word "blog" was also coined by Peter Merholz in 1999.
  • Business.com was sold for US$7.5million marking the largest domain sale at that point (in 2007 it was resold for a whopping $345 million). Some years later Quirk attempted to buy Quirk.com but after a similar response it was decided that it's really not that important after all. J
  • 1999 was also the year that Rob and Craig Raw (now CTO) first met - at an outdoor trance party, of all places...

2000:

  • January was met with a great sigh of relief after we all survived the predicted Y2K bomb, but there was another explosion going off. The dot.com bubble was popping due to overinvestment by venture capitalists in online opportunities. Approximately $5 trillion in market value was lost with about 50% of dot.com business failing. With just over 1 billion indexable pages this dot.com crash marked a considerable loss for this emerging industry.
  • In the same year Napster found themselves in court for the illegal distribution of MP3s and Google finally launched their incredibly successful AdWords system which has since revolutionised the Search Marketing industry.
  • Other interesting happenings in 2000 include the release of the Cluetrain Manifesto and the increase of mobile usage to 35 text messages being sent per user per month. With 360 million Internet users, the Web was by all accounts rather tiny - that said, Quirk stuck it out and managed to keep their head above water during this incredibly difficult time.

2001:

  • Following the dot.com crash of 2000, companies were far less likely to invest in online ventures and everybody seemed to be clamping down on this evil known as the Internet. The final straw came when the forwarding of emails was banned in Australia (through its Digital Agenda Act of March 4) due to its breach of personal copyright.
  • 2001 was a year of recovery for the Internet and a time of a radical evaluation of how the Net was to continue.
  • Two years after their first meeting Craig, joined Quirk and took up the position of CTO. Never have two completely different individuals got along so well and the fact that Craig and Rob are still such good friends is testimony to this.

2002:

  • The concept of blogging finally took off as a means for consumers to create a Web presence for themselves. In contrast, the US took active measures to regulate the use of Children's Internet by registering a kid's safe domain called kids.us. While this never gained huge popularity it was aggressively monitored and is still managed to this date.
  • 2002 also marked the beginning of the end for many Web Designers and Developers as Internet Explorer gained 95% market ownership around the world. It's worth noting that their percentage of marketshare has been decreasing ever since.

2003:

  • 3 years after the dot.com crash, the Internet began to really recover and 2003 marked a year of tremendous growth. Highlights include the first Flash Mob (hosted in New York), Google achieving 250 million daily searches and the leaking of the infamous "Starwars kid" video which has since received over 1 billion views.
  • Various other more serious activities took place including the creating of the approval of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM act of 2003) which regulated three fundamental online devices: Unsubscribe Compliance (opt-out must be available), Content Compliance (content presented and subsequent action must be in agreement) and Send Behaviour Compliance (Content of emails must be unfalsified). Off the back of this Quirk created its very own Email Marketing software, named Milk. Craig recalls: "I was surviving on oats at the time and milk was the only thing that made it palatable after months.")
  • 2003 also saw the launch of Quirk SearchStatus which Craig developed to scratch our own SEO itch. It has since grown to be the world's favourite Firefox SEO plug-in with over 440 000 users and almost 20 000 weekly downloads from a combination of Mozilla.com and Quirk.biz.

2004:

  • Google launched its free email service Gmail in Beta offering users 1GB of space to save their messages. Gmail was launched on an invite only basis and was met with huge demand around the world.
  • Later that same year the world phenomenon Subservient Chicken was launched and Burger King became one of the first brands to gain international viral fame.
  • It was also the year that marked Janine Carpenter's arrival at Quirk. She started off as an Account Manager and became COO in 2006. With the three top dogs now in office, it was time to really start expanding and the Johannesburg QuirkStation was founded under the watchful eye of Scott Gray (now Interactive Marketing Manager for BMW South Africa).

2005:

  • Facebook was launched in 2005 as a means for Harvard students to communicate. This year also marked the year of large scale Internet sales with over £1.35 billion in Affiliate Marketing generated sales. Similarly, Email Marketing grew substantially to a point that US$400 million was spent on it in the USA alone and finally, on the 24 hour Christmas Day period over 205million text messages were sent throughout the UK.
  • Other landmark events included the creation of the 50 cent army of China and the London Bombing (which was caught on cell phone camera and distributed around the world). It was in this year that Google purchased what is now known as Google Earth and Time Magazine's person of the year was "YOU" - which marked the shift in power into the hands of the consumers.
  • The London QuirkStation was opened under the guidance of Catherine Parker with Rob spending 6 months of the year in Cape Town (summers obviously) and 6 months in the UK. During this time Craig stepped up and took over the role of CEO for a year.

2006:

  • 2006 saw the cost of the 3 core online business resources (processor speed, bandwidth and storage space) reduced dramatically and as a consequence AOL took the leap of faith and made the vast majority of their services free favouring the advertising supported model instead.
  • BrandsEye - our Online Reputation Monitoring and Management software - went on private internal release with a selection of key Quirk clients coming on board to test and provide feedback on how the tool performed.
  • It was also in 2006 that incuBeta took a very active interest in Quirk which resulted in them acquiring a substantial portion of the company. This became the launch pad from which Quirk could fly into 2007 and 2008!

2007:

  • Commoncraft launched "RSS in plain English" which was a raving success and provided the non-technical online users with a means of understanding this brave new world.
  • Twitter grew to 340 000 users, only to grow by 300% in the next year and then 55 000% the year after that.
  • 2007 also saw the introduction of Managing Director, Nic Ray to the London QuirkStation. This is when things really started heating up for Quirk in the UK.

2008:

  • According to Rob, this year was the year of Quirk, with the launch of BrandsEye, our eMarketing textbook (our Creative Commons registered eMarketing textbook entitled eMarketing - the essential guide to online marketing), Idea Bounty (Quirk's crowdsourcing solution where the best ideas get paid) as well as outreach activities such as UnitedForAfrica which looked to respond to the Xenophobic violence in South Africa.
  • It was also a big year for Google who opened offices in Africa (South Africa) and launched Google Maps in Kenya. Google also purchased  DoubleClick for the small fee of $3.1 billion. Thus allowing Google to serve both Search advertising as well as general display advertising across other websites.

2009:

  • Quirk turns 10 and founder, Rob Stokes turns 30! Need we say more?

Stay abreast of the latest Quirk developments by reading our eMarketing blog.