An Irritating Rut in Internet’s Vast Frontier

As a television viewer, I am indebted to the “dot-com” industry for the cheery vaudeville enlivening my television viewing this holiday season. Those hurtling gerbils, dodge ball-playing commuters, boyfriends adrift in the lingerie department, dweebs trying to pick out a fine wine--they’re like family to me now. I will certainly miss them and their sponsoring Internet companies when reality fries their sorry behinds and they leave us forever, come January.

This thought comes to mind because I’ve noticed that nine-tenths of the Web sites advertising on TV lately are selling the same thing: shopping. One site may be devoted to shopping for wine, another to shopping for software and computers, a third to shopping for a shopping Web site that will help you choose among all the other shopping Web sites, but the principle is identical.

E-commerce has descended on us with a vengeance, and it all looks pretty threadbare. There is scarcely a single site advertised that actually provides a service for which the World Wide Web is uniquely suited, unless it’s the e-brokerages offering rock-bottom commissions to financial dimwits with all the feigned innocence of cigarette companies sniffing around the high schools.

On the other hand, there seems to be 47,000 new ways to shop. Send.com caters to gift givers, Pets.com to people who need to give gifts to their ferrets. Even AltaVista, which used to be merely a search engine of some distinction, is pitching itself on TV as a shopping site.

The real joke is how many of these new sites claim to make e-shopping “easier.” We have been living in a consumer economy for, what, a good 5 1/2 decades already, and if we don’t have the procedure down pat by now, then the unintelligible shopping interface found at Brodia.com isn’t likely to help much. (What’s a Brodia, anyway?) And what’s the point of a new technology if it turns something inherently intuitive, like buying something we don’t need, into such a complicated process that it has to cook up methods to de-complicate it all over again?

The prevalence of e-commerce sites among the hot Web properties of the moment suggests that the medium is suffering from an alarming intellectual fatigue. The image of some venture capitalist or start-up entrepreneur sitting bolt upright and going, “I know! Let’s start a shopping site!” evokes the television executive ordering up 22 episodes of something because he’s convinced it will be “the next ‘Friends.’ ”

Then again, it has long been obvious that of all information and entertainment media, the Internet was destined to enjoy the shortest Golden Age in history. Even television, vast wasteland that it is, had a good 10 years, from the early ‘50s through the Kennedy assassination, to try out serious drama and trenchant comedy, “Panorama” and “The Honeymooners” and “Sgt. Bilko.” It is only recently, after all, that the medium got taken over by that truly indigenous American art form, the infomercial.

This is not to say there isn’t anything worthwhile on the Web. This year has seen the arrival of great utilities such as GuruNet and XDrive, the transfer of Encyclopaedia Britannica to free Web space, and the gestation of scads of interesting new entertainment formats.

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But nothing defines Internet time like the haste with which the mass-market Web has been ceded over to commercial panders. Many of the e-commerce sites advertising this month on TV don’t even pretend to provide anything other than a shopping service.

How many of these do we need?

Let me break it to them: If the book I want isn’t available on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com, I’m not about to waste my time looking for it on Shopping.com or Buy.com or any other gettingandspending.com. I still know how to make it to the corner bookstore.

What is driving the proliferation of nearly identical commerce sites isn’t logic, but the desperation of entrepreneurs who still haven’t figured out how to make money from an explosively pervasive information medium. Want a scary experience? Just listen to some of these businessmen talk about “monetizing” their users’ eyeballs; that’s my money they’re talking about, and yours . . . and our eyeballs.

Web site operators that have tried selling advertising have found not only that it doesn’t succeed in producing profits, but even alienates their fickle clientele. Experience shows that as soon as GeoCities or TheGlobe.com figures out how to plaster enough banner ads on their pages to turn a profit, millions of registered eyeballs will flee to Angelfire or Tripod or some other advertising-light community site.

That’s why over the last year e-commerce has become the Web CEO’s byword: Instead of selling ads, they’d sell stuff, and keep a percentage of every transaction.

Everybody piled onto this bandwagon, forcing the e-commerce boys to descend to gimmickry like weekly prize drawings and discount coupons, not to mention the usual Amazon-style loss-leader pricing, to attract customers.

Gimmicks, of course, won’t save any of these sites if they can’t deliver the goods. (As I write this, EToys is telling me that the Intel microscope I ordered two weeks ago is unavailable, even though it’s listed as in stock on its Web site and is visible on store shelves all over town.)

The best riff I’ve heard lately on the never-ending search for Web profits came from the Web-savvy comedian Sinbad. He materialized inexplicably, and hilariously, to monopolize an otherwise dire panel discussion at the recent Jupiter Communications entertainment industry conference in Beverly Hills, where he suggested to the other panelists that maybe the Internet is destined to never make anybody money! (Wouldn’t that be the ultimate hoot.)

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Sinbad’s monologue didn’t receive the laughter it deserved from the audience, possibly because it touched too acutely their deepest fears.

Their answer at the moment is to conjure up ways to make advertising even more personal and obtrusive than it already is. Just the other day, a young Internet developer I know was lamenting the sad inefficiencies of television advertising; his point was that the Internet, empowered by such ancillary technologies as wireless transmission, would allow advertisers to home in ever more accurately on our needs and desires.

“Today you go home, you sit on your couch to watch TV, and you get the advertiser’s message,” he said. “But how are you going to act on that message from your couch?”

The Web, he argued, will not only target advertising to you personally, but push it at you when and where you’re most susceptible. (“Here’s a commercial--selected especially for you!”) “Imagine a world,” he said, “where just as you’re passing a Starbucks your palmtop says, ‘How about a latte?’ ”

To him this conjured up Nirvana. To me it evoked something else: a world in which every Starbucks on the planet has a gaping hole in its front window, made by some guy’s palmtop that didn’t know when to shut up.

Staff writer Michael Hiltzik is the author of the book “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.” He can be reached at michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.