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The dream of the 1990s internet is still alive, if you look in the right corners.

More than 17 million Americans regularly use MapQuest, one of the first digital mapping websites that was long ago overtaken by Google and Apple, according to data from the research firm Comscore. The dot-com-era internet portal Go.com shut down 20 years ago, but its ghost lives on in the Go thats part of web addresses for some Disney sites.

Ask Jeeves, a web search engine that started before Google, still has fans and people typing Ask Jeeves a question into Google searches.

Maybe you scoff at AOL, but it is still the 50th most popular website in the U.S., according to figures from SimilarWeb. The early 2000s virtual world Second Life never went away and is now having a second life as a proto-metaverse brand.

Some onetime online stars have stuck around far longer than we might have expected, showing that its possible to carve out a life online long after stardom fades.

These are almost cockroach brands, said Ben Schott, a brand and advertising columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Theyre small enough and resilient enough that they cant be killed.

A comparison to scurrying bugs may not seem to be a compliment. But there is something heartwarming about pioneers that shaped the early internet, lost their cool and dominance, and eventually carved out a niche. Theyll never be as popular or powerful as they were a generation ago, but musty internet brands might still have a fruitful purpose.

These brands have managed to stay alive through a combination of inertia, nostalgia, the fact theyve produced a product that people like, digital moneymaking prowess and oddities of the rickety internet. If todays internet powers like Facebook and Pinterest lose relevance, too, they could stick around for decades.

System1, which owns MapQuest and HowStuffWorks among other websites, has a strategy to draw people to its collection of digital properties through advertising pitches or other techniques, turn them into loyal users and make money from their clicks or other sales. Its not far off the early 2000s web strategy of turning eyeballs into revenue.

Michael Blend, the chief executive officer and co-founder of System1, said that his company spent money on internet advertisements to lure people to MapQuest and also improved its mapping functions. One feature added since System1 bought MapQuest from Verizon in 2019 lets delivery couriers plot long routes with many stops.

Blend said that Gen X nostalgia or online marketing might persuade people to try MapQuest once or twice, but that the company wanted to make the site useful enough that they keep coming back regularly. He also said that more than half of people using MapQuest are young enough that they might never have known it in its heyday.

Blend is proud that MapQuest has stuck around as long as it has. There are plenty of internet brands that have come and gone and you never hear from them again, he told me.

I dont have a great explanation for the resilience of some 1990s internet properties. People are searching for Ask Jeeves even though its owner, the internet conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp, gave up the English butler name in 2005 and quit trying to compete with Google search more than a decade ago. The website now called Ask.com is mostly a compilation of entertainment and celebrity news.

A spokesman for Disney, which used to own the Go.com internet portal, didnt have a solid explanation for why some of the companys internet sites still have fingerprints of Go. (The Onion years ago mocked Disney for this.) Generally, todays websites are often built on top of remnants of the old internet like a modern mansion erected on the foundation of a 19th-century home.

Schott mentioned something that I cant get out of my head. He said that when a once-loved restaurant chain or industrial factory shuts down, the typical public reaction is sadness for what people have lost. But Schott said that when internet properties like Yahoo and Myspace sag or die, its often brushed off as a joke.

There is a weird schadenfreude when tech companies fail that I dont think happens to other industries, he said. Im not sure what that is about.

Maybe thats starting to change. When Microsoft retired its 27-year-old Internet Explorer web browser this month, the nostalgia poured out. As the internet ages and so do those of us who remember its early years the more we might feel stirrings of emotion for what came before.

Chinas eyes on its citizens: An investigation from The New York Times found that surveillance by Chinese authorities is more extensive than was previously understood. The police want facial-recognition cameras where people eat and shop and even in private spaces like residential buildings and hotels. The authorities are buying equipment to build large-scale databases of iris scans and DNA. The goal, my colleagues reported, is to maximize what the state can find out about a persons identity, activities and social connections, which could ultimately help the government maintain its authoritarian rule.

Watch the video investigation here.

Complaints about a bait and switch: Small business owners say that Google got them hooked on the companys free customized email and other workplace software and now is requiring payment in a process they found ham-handed. It struck me as needlessly petty, one business owner told my colleague Nico Grant.

Other car companies have Tesla envy: Established auto manufacturers like Ford want to sell more of their cars directly to buyers online, as Tesla does. One problem: Laws in many states require cars to be sold through dealerships, Paul Stenquist writes for The Times.

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MapQuest and Other Internet Zombies - The New York Times

Global Industrial Lubricants Market: Snapshot

The global industrial lubricants market is prognosticated to gather demand from soaring trend of increase in manufacturing activities in Asia Pacific which creates a requirement of lubricating oils in metal foundry, power generation, textiles, automotive, chemicals, and other industries. Rising significance of machinery maintenance in improving efficiency and reducing operational downtime could play a telling role in surging the demand for industrial lubricants. Rising awareness among businesses in the aforementioned industries is expected to complement this trend in the coming years.

Product innovation is another trend observed in the global industrial lubricants market where use of different additives could be on the rise to enhance sustainability and lifecycle of lubricating oils. A companys focus on current products, future tactics, and development activities in the market could be influenced by changing specifications related to emissions, lubricant function, and feedstock usage. Product offerings and research and development processes of a lubricant manufacturer could be shaped by the crucial part industry regulations play.

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A more sustainable ecosystem is said to be adopted by the global industrial lubricants market over the past few years. In this regard, companies are observed to reduce wastage and byproducts by improving their overall production, comply with ecolabel norms, and actively develop bio-based feedstock routes. Substantial initiatives taken by players are projected to become prominent across North America and Europe. Here, manufacturers could possess technological know-how and financial capital to take their initiatives forward.

Production landscape of the global industrial lubricants market could be shifted toward Asia Pacific as developing economies in the region turn into neo-manufacturing hubs for chemicals, textiles, automobiles, electronics, and consumer goods. With Southeast Asia, India, and China touted as larger growth contributors, consumption trends in the region could be shaped by the markets positive economic outlook.

Global Industrial Lubricants Market: Overview

Lubricants play an important role in ensuring the efficient working of industrial machineries by reducing friction between machine parts that are mutually connected to each other. In a vast variety of industrial applications that require the usage of massive machines, lubricants help reduce wear and tear of machine components operating at high speeds, lower down the amount of heat that is generally generated, and avoid losses. Lubricants also play a crucial role in preventing accidents that are caused by leaks and spills and help increase productivity.

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While witnessing expansion at a steady pace across the globe in the recent years, the market has gone through a significant phase of transformation owing to changing consumer preferences and increased inclination of the industrial sector towards bio-based products owing to stringent regulations. Thus the market has witnessed an increased focus of leading vendors towards research and development activities in the recent years. The trend is expected to remain strong in the next few years as well.

Global Industrial Lubricants Market: Trends and Opportunities

The global industrial lubricants market is estimated to expand at a steady pace in the next few years. Key factors working in favor of the market include the massive rise in industrialization, especially across emerging economies, rising demand for automation and integration of advanced machineries in the industrial sector, and the reducing costs of crude oil and derivatives. However, stringent environment-related regulations are posing a threat to the market for conventional oil-based and synthetic lubricants. Nevertheless, the scenario could prove to be beneficial for companies who have already started investing in the field of bio-based and eco-friendly products.

Global Industrial Lubricants Market: Segmentation

For providing a much thorough account of the global industrial lubricants market, the report segments the market based on criteria such as end-use industry, applications, type of source, and geography.

Key end-use industries for the industrial lubricants market covered in the report include oil and gas, manufacturing, food, power generation, and automotive. Of these, the automotive industry, like present times, is likely to remain the leading consumer of industrial lubricants in the next few years. The thriving expansion of the industry across emerging economies and its steady recovery in developed economies have reinstated it as a mammoth force driving a number of associated industries and markets, which also includes the industrial lubricants market. With analysts predicting a healthy future for the automotive industry in the near future, the demand for lubricants, associated with the automotive sector, is also expected to be influences positively.

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Based on application, the market has been segmented into hydraulic lubricants, gear lubricants, and compressor lubricants. Based on the type of source, the market has been examined for synthetic oil, bio-based oil, and mineral oil. Presently, the market witnesses the dominance of the mineral oil segment owing to the mechanical superiority of lubricants manufactured from mineral oils. However, the market for lubricants made from bio-based sources is expected to see expansion at a massive pace, thanks to stringent regulations forcing industries to switch to eco-friendly lubricants.

Global Industrial Lubricants Market: Geographical and Competitive Dynamics

From a geographical standpoint, the report examines the industrial lubricants market for region such as Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Latin America, and North America. The global market presently gains a large share of its overall revenue owing to sales across the Asia Pacific region. The thriving industrial sector in emerging economies of India and China has made the region a hotspot for a number of markets associated with industrial applications in the recent years. The trend is likely to continue to drive the market for industrial lubricants in the next few years as well, allowing Asia Pacific to remain a key force in the global industrial lubricants market in the next few years as well.

Some of the leading companies operating in the highly competitive global industrial lubricants market are Shell, Total, Chevron Corporation, ExxonMobil, and BP

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TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.

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Industrial Lubricants Market Is Prognosticated To Gather Demand | Forecast Year [ 2021-031] - Digital Journal

Dstillery, the custom audience solutions company, is taking steps to drive growth by promoting two integral team members.AmeliaWhite, Ph.D., will assume the role of Vice President of Data Science Research, andPatti Boyle, Ed.D., will serve as Chief Marketing Officer. The promotions strengthen the companys ability to improve its artificial-intelligence-powered advertising solutions and win the cookieless future.

White joined Dstillery as a data scientist in 2015 and began leading the Data Science Research team in 2018. To date, White has invented two of Dstillerys 16 patented technologies. She created Dstillerys cookieless solution,ID-freeCustom AI, and is the lead inventor on the patent describing this approach. She also developed Dstillerys Map of the Internet (MOTI), a foundational technology powering ID-free and other Dstillery products.

Amelia brings innovative and impactful machine learning solutions through her research and leadership, saidMelinda Han Williams, Ph.D., Chief Data Scientist at Dstillery. She has developed countless improvements to Dstillerys products and supervised the development of countless more. Amelia keeps Dstillerys solutions on the cutting edge of applied machine learning.

Boyle has been a strategic marketing leader at Dstillery since 2019, most recently as Head of Marketing. Responsible for advancing brand positioning, digital marketing and lead generation, she drives results by developing and executing growth plans, fostering client and partner relationships and overseeing integrated marketing programs. Boyle built a marketing team from the ground up, created a new marketing strategy and managed a brand refresh. She has raised the brand profile, ramped up qualified leads built on account-based marketing and a focused paid media strategy and enhanced the companys thought leadership through a purposeful PR, event and content marketing program.

Since the start of her time with Dstillery, Patti has positioned the company for success, saidMichael Beebe, Dstillery CEO. She has hired a stellar team, and together that team reconstituted the companys marketing around a clear strategy that supports our mission. Patti is a maximizer, a strategist, a learner and an achiever. In the role as CMO, her inspired and inspiring leadership will take our marketing to the next level.

In addition to Boyle and Whites recent promotions, Dstillery continues improving its ID-free Custom AI solution.

These ID-free targeting solutions allow advertisers to respect consumers privacy while also delivering campaign results, said Beebe. The promotions of Amelia and Patti strengthen our position and set us up for greater innovation as agencies and advertisers prepare for the sunsetting of third-party cookies.

Tune in to Martech Cube Podcast for visionary Martech Trends, Martech News, and quick updates by business experts and leaders!

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Dstillery Accelerates Growth with Two Key Executive Promotions - Martechcube

Though web analytics is almost as old as the internet itself, the field has transformed dramatically since inception.

Before the decade is out, the data analytics market is expected to be worth $550 billion. Today, millions of businesses around the world rely on Google Analytics (or comparable software) to better understand customer wishes and optimize their web experiences. Though web analytics is almost as old as the internet itself, the field has transformed dramatically since inception.

Let's take a look at the history of web analytics, how Google took over and where it's going next.

Three years after the internet was born, the first analytics solutions appeared. Hit counters, or simple code that can display the number of page views, came first. They were simple to use without any IT experience.

Slightly more complex at this time was log analysis, which could interpret server logs and help identify sources of web traffic. As websites grew more complex, so too did server logs. Caching, or temporarily storing a file in the system to avoid multiple HTTP requests, didnt show up on the log, leaving gaps in the data.

This was a problem until JavaScript came along. JavaScript allowed tag-based tracking, which kept track of far more than just hits. Thanks to tag-based tracking, analytics moved into the domain of marketing. Marketers began to create targeted advertising, optimize their website copy, and more.

Related Article: Google's Move Away From Universal Analytics: What It Means for Digital Marketers

Around the turn of the century, it could take up to 24 hours for large companies to process their website data. That is, until Urchin came along and did it in as short a time as 15 minutes. Urchin quickly expanded its client base and offerings until Google bought them in 2005. And so Google Analytics was born.

Google Analytics was built as a hosted analytics solution that is heavily focused on quantitative data. The service ties in directly with Googles other web marketing offers and provides in depth, tag-based data. Its farthest reaching effort has been Universal Analytics, which was introduced in 2012. Universal Analytics lived up to its name by allowing for the tracking of users across multiple devices and platforms through the assignment of user IDs. Through this software, offline behavior monitoring, demographics, and (as of 2016) machine learning provided consumer insight with incredible detail at the cost of user privacy.

Related Article: Google Is Forcing the Switch to GA4 and Many Brands Aren't Happy

Partially in response to Universal Analytics far reach, some governments passed new online privacy laws. The most well-known example is the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in 2018.

To better comply with the new rules, Google released Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in 2020. GA4 only uses first-party cookies, and its Consent Mode adjusts the types of data collected based on user permissions. However, GA4 is still able to offer detailed consumer insight by reverting (in a way) to a previous mode of tracking: hit collection. GA4 considers every event a hit, collecting data that stretches far beyond page views.

GA4 also makes upgrades unrelated to privacy like collecting data in the same way for both web and mobile. Other new features include real-time reports, cross-platform reporting, and the ability to exclude users for certain behaviors. Universal Analytics shuts down July 2023 in favor of GA4.

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The Evolution of Web Analytics - CMSWire

As best as I can tell, the puff-sleeve onslaught began in 2018. The clothing designer Batsheva Hays eponymous brand was barely two years old, but her high-necked, ruffle-trimmed, elbow-covering dresses in dense florals and upholstery printsbizarro-world reimaginings of the conservative frocks favored by Hasidic Jewish women and the Amishhad developed a cult following among weird New York fashion-and-art girls. Almost all of her early designs featured some kind of huge, puffy sleeve; according to a lengthy profile in The New Yorker published that September, the custom-made dress that inspired Hays line had enough space in the shoulders to store a few tennis balls.

Batsheva dresses arent for everyone. They can cost more than $400, first of all, and more important, theyre weird: When paired with Jordans and decontextualized on a 20-something Instagram babe, the clothes of religious fundamentalism become purposefully unsettling. But as described in that cerulean-sweater scene from The Devil Wears Prada, what happens at the tip-top of the fashion hierarchy rains down on the rest of us. So it went with the puff sleeve. Batsheva and a handful of other influential indie designers adopted the puff around the same time, and the J.Crews and ASOSes and Old Navys of the world took notice. Puff sleeves filtered down the price tiers, in one form or another, just like a zillion trends have beforestreamlined for industrial-grade reproduction and attached to a litany of dresses and shirts that dont require a models body or an heiresss bank account. And then, unlike most trends, it stuck around.

Four years later, the puff sleeve still has its boot firmly on the neck of the American apparel market. If you have tried to buy any womens clothes this year, you already knew thatthe sleeves are everywhere, at every size and price level, most of them stripped of the weirdness that made the originals compelling and ready to make you look like a milkmaid in the most boring way imaginable. At a time when most fashion trends have gotten more ephemeral and less universal because of constant product churn, some manage to achieve the opposite: a ubiquity that feels disconnected from perceptible demand. Right now its puff sleeves, but weve also seen cold shoulders, peplums, crop tops, pussybows, fanny packs, and shacketsa host of looks that have generated their own aesthetic feedback loops, iterated until the buying public cant stand them anymore. Americans now have more consumer choice than ever, at least going by the sheer volume of available products, but so much of the clothing that ends up in stores looks uncannily the same.

When you take creative decisions out of the hands of actual humans, some funny stuff starts to happen. For most of the 20th century, designing clothes for mass consumption was still dependent in large part on the ideas and creative instincts of individuals, according to Shawn Grain Carter, a professor of fashion business management at the Fashion Institute of Technology and a former retail buyer and product developer. Even most budget-minded clothing retailers had fashion offices that sent people out into the world to see what was going on, both within the industry and in the culture at large, and find compelling ideas that could be alchemized into products for consumers. One of these employees might see some weirdo dressed like a frontier bride at a bar in the East Village and later say in a meeting, What if we did a couple of pieces with puff sleeves? Development and design work still involved plenty of unglamorous business concernssell-through rates, product mix, seasonal sales projectionsbut the process relied on human taste and judgment. Designers were more likely to be able to take calculated risks.

At the end of the 1990s, things in fashion started to change. Conglomeration accelerated within the industry, and companies that had once been independent businesses with creative autonomy began to consolidate, gaining scale while sanding off many of their quirks. Computers and the internet were becoming more central to the work, even on the creative side. Trend-forecasting agencies, long a part of the product-development process for the largest American retailers, began to create more sophisticated data aggregation and analysis techniques, and their services gained wider popularity and deeper influence. As clothing design and trendspotting became more centralized and data-reliant, the liberalization of the global garment trade allowed cheap clothing made in developing countries to pour into the American retail market in unlimited quantities for the first time. That allowed European fast-fashion companies to take a shot at the American consumer market, and in 2000, the Swedish clothing behemoth H&M arrived on the countrys shores.

Fast fashion overhauled American shopping and dressing habits in short order. The business model uses cheap materials, low foreign wages, and fast turnaround times to bombard customers with huge numbers of new products, gobbling up market share from slower, more expensive retailers with the promise of constant wardrobe novelty for a nominal fee. Traditional brands, which would commonly plan new collections and develop products for more than a year in advance, couldnt keep up with competitors that digested trend and sales data and regurgitated new designs in a matter of weeks.

Read: Why urban Millennials love Uniqlo

Fast fashion has only gotten faster. Shein, a Chinese company that has existed in its current form since 2012, has grown at breakneck speed by marketing the wares of domestic garment factories directly to Western consumers, and by turning around new clothing in just a few days. A 2021 investigation by Rest of World found that, over the course of a month, Shein added an average of more than 7,000 new items to its website every day. The companys success, like that of Spain-based Zara before it, is built on taking the guesswork out of trends: By constantly creating and test-marketing new products, it can measure consumers immediate reactions and quickly resupply what sells. That is to say, it can just trawl the internet for anything that shoppers already find vaguely compelling, make a bunch of versions on the cheap, and track responses to them in real time.

Doing exactly that has made Shein very successful. The company generates new garments to capitalize on whatever is happening on the internet at any given moment, turning out pastoral frocks to maximize #cottagecores TikTok virality or cadging the work of independent artists and designers, as the company has repeatedly been accused of doing. To stay afloat, traditional retailers have had to become more like their fast-fashion competition, relying more on data and the advice of large consulting firms and less on the creativity and expertise of their staff. The days of the designer saying, Look, this is what Ive done, and this is your choice or forget about itthose days have gone, Grain Carter told me.

When enough brands and retailers begin using these inventory tactics and trend-prediction methods, the results homogenize over time. At the top of the food chain, a designer has an interesting idea, and bigger, more efficient retailers dont just copy itthey copy one anothers copies. The sameness persists on multiple levelsnot only do lots of companies end up making garments that look very much alike, but for efficiencys sake, theyre also often the same garments those companies made in past seasons, gussied up with new details. That these trend feedback loops often center on sleeves or necklines or trim is no coincidence, according to Grain Carter. Changing a dresss flutter sleeve to a puff or a blouses collar to a pussybow is unlikely to affect the garments fit or sizing. Those kinds of changes appeal to customers who want certain parts of their bodies concealed, making the trends marketable to the largest possible audience, across size, age, and income level.

Read: Ultra-fast fashion is eating the world

Bringing back old garments with new details is among the oldest tricks in the apparel book. But when you optimize that trick to wring every last dollar from itand do so at the expense of trying out new, unproven ideasyou get a perpetual-motion machine, generating dress after dress that is difficult to distinguish from the ones that came before. Even clothes from different brands will look almost exactly the same; in fact, they might actually be the same. As supply chains have become more dispersed and complicated, multiple brands can end up buying inventories of the same garment, from the same supplier, and putting their own labels in them. You, too, can sometimes buy (and then resell) wholesale quantities of that same garment on AliExpress, a website that aggregates stock from Asian factories for sale to international buyers.

The unglamorous realities of production have long been hidden from the public in order to preserve the magic of mass-market consumption. A century ago, this was achieved largely through cathedral-like department stores, but now the sleight of hand is a little differentlavish ad campaigns and sponsorship deals with celebrities and social-media influencers help elevate the vibes of largely dreadful clothing. Thats not just because shopping for clothes has become an ever more internet-centric pursuit. The garments in question, most of which dont exactly jump off the hanger in person and fit poorly once tried on, benefit from careful photography and liberal photo editingand from requiring shoppers to pay up front. Not only does this create an extra step between buyers and the realities of modern clothing design and production, but it opens a chasm between buyers and the clothes themselves. At a certain point, you are not really paying for a product, but for the hopeful experience of buying something new. Whatever dress eventually shows up at your house is largely incidental to the momentary rush of acquiring it.

For the average shopper, this opacity can magnify the sense that a particular style has become inescapable overnight, largely unbidden. Who asked for all these tops with holes in the sleeves? Were peoples shoulders getting too hot? An idea that would have been moderately popular a few decades ago, before petering out naturally, now sticks around in an endless present, like an unattended record that has begun to skip. Shoppers may encounter the farcical limits of algorithmic selling on a regular basis, but those limits are more plain when Amazon is trying to sell you a second new kitchen faucet, after interpreting your DIY repairs as an indicator of a potential general interest in plumbing fixtures. With clothes, the technology is less obviously stupid, and more insidious. We know you love these shirts, because youve already bought three like them. Can we interest you in another? Frequently enoughwhich may be just one in every 100,000 people who see the productthe answer is yes, and the record skips on.

This problem is not limited to fashion. As creative industries become more consolidated and more beholden to producing ever-expanding profits for their shareholders, companies stop taking even calculated risks. You get theaters full of comic-book adaptations and remakes of past hits instead of movies about adults, for adults. Streaming services fill their libraries with shows meant to play in the background while you scroll your phone. Stores stock up on stuff you might not love, but which the data predict you wont absolutely hate. You have too many fashion companies, both on the retail side and the manufacturing side, being driven by empty suits, Grain Carter said. Consumable products are everywhere, and maybe the most we can hope for is that their persistent joylessness will eventually doom the corporations that foist them upon us.

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Fashion Has Abandoned Human Taste - The Atlantic