Prodigy pioneered advertising, subscription content, and online shopping models that later giants adopted

Evidence

Prodigy did no better. As it continued to shed users and cash, by the late 1990s the original owners had given up and sold out for $200 million to a group of executives funded in part by the Mexican telecom authority, Telmex. The company was later sold to AT&T, where, after a short-lived effort to co-brand it with Yahoo!, it was never to be heard from again. Yet the original management was onto something, for all of the ideas that Prodigy pioneered would eventually come to fruition in other places. Its reliance on advertising was not only copied by AOL but most of the Internet’s most successful companies. Paying professionals to make content that was accessed online would look less foolish by the mid-2010s, the age of Netflix. Finally, online shopping also turned out to be a source of decent revenue. Prodigy’s masters didn’t have the wrong ideas, but they blew it anyway. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 741

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Milgrom/Roberts story of failed originators whose models later succeed — the Prodigy of the online world foreshadowing its Amazon and Netflix descendants. — connects to: Prodigy pioneered online advertising as its core business model in 1991 — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 699; The first consumer online services were conceived as attention-reselling advertising platforms. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 703

Broader Connections

• The first consumer online services were conceived as attention-reselling advertising platforms. #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 703