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>> As ZDNet celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we thought a moment of reflection was in order -- how the site came to be, where it is today, and of course what the future holds.
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>> If you've been following ZDNet over the years, you know it's been through quite a few changes.
>> ZDNet originally started on Compuserve and Prodigy. It started out as a property called ZiffNet, which was basically a way to publish articles on a bulletin board system.
>> But ZiffNet was only the beginning. Bill Ziff, the publisher of Ziff Davis, and popular print publications like PC Magazine, saw the digital revolution coming with the advent of the world wide web, and he took action.
>> It was a magazine business. It was a very profitable high margin business, and so there wasn't a lot of incentive to get away from that business. But Bill saw an opportunity, and saw that this was where consumers would go as well.
>> In June of 1995, ZDNet.com launched on the web, and quickly it became the go-to destination for technology enthusiasts, exploiting its publishing empire at Ziff Davis, but also taking advantage of what made the Internet unique.
>> It was a combination of taking the right content, understanding how to package it, building a lot of the technology that didn't exist at the time.
>> Soon, the Internet would start to bubble up.
>> Hex.com phonetic delivers food to your house.
>> Back in those days I think a lot of people lost their tether with reality.
>> Whoa.
>> Things were pretty, pretty insane.
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>> And for ZDNet it was a time of explosive growth.
>> You had news, you had product reviews, you had product downloads, you had games.
>> We must have had over 60 separate sites by topic and category, and as well as worldwide, with sites in Latin America, China, Japan, all over Europe. So it was an incredible boom, and growing very fast.
>> There was even a publicly traded stock tracking ZDNet under the symbol ZDZ on the New York Stock Exchange. And while ZDNet continued to expand, it was also waging war with its rival, CNET, a network of technology focused websites founded in the mid-90s by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie.
>> We wanted to crush CNET. That's what we wanted to do.
>> The rivalry was intense. It was intense for talent, it was intense for content.
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>> And then there was the infamous day where CNET announced that they were gonna spend 100 million dollars in advertising.
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>> And I remember getting an email from Shelby saying we're comin' at you. And I remember responding to him and said, bring it.
>> But instead of fighting a protracted war, competing for the same ad revenue, the two tech entities joined up.
>> Well a major merger this week between a pair of pioneers on the Internet.
>> And on July 19th, 2000, CNET announced it was buying ZDNet for 1.6 billion dollars. The marriage turned out to be a strong fit, and good timing, as the dot com bubble would soon pop. The two companies were better as one, and the merger also gave ZDNet a new focus.
>> We really veered ZDNet more towards, you know, a very credible product in the business technology arena.
>> It was more business to business focus, really helping those people who were driving large volume sales, give them more and more information on the things that they needed.
>> The dot com crash had also left budgets tight. But from the rubble emerged new technologies. And in 2003 ZDNet reinvented itself, and introduced blogs.
>> Rather than us at ZDNet telling people what we thought and what's going on, we could expand the number of voices greatly, and bring in 30 or 40 or 50 new voices -- bloggers to tell us what's off the news. And that -- that really created much more of a -- a sense of community, a sense of -- of where there's a lot of interesting discussion going on, which was really one of the keys of Web 2.0.
>> Today, ZDNet is owned by CBS, and is visited by more than 90 million users a month around the world.
>> I think it's a -- it's tremendous brand. And -- and the fact that it's still here today, serving the size audience it serves is a testimony. I mean how many dot coms are gone?
>> We were the first to use technologies to make the ads more robust, yet not slow down the site delivery. So a lot of the innovation that people are leveraging today, data, technology scale was really created at ZDNet.
>> So what does the next chapter hold for ZDNet? A deeper dive into topics. And ZDNet will also be introducing a brand new feature to the site later this year, ZDNet Pro.
>> ZDNet Pro is going to be a subscription service that focuses on research, a lot of the emerging topics. We also have -- a lot of our contributors are also consultants.
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>> So it's gonna be an exclusive community where you can get questions answered.
>> So stay tuned for the next 20 years. We promise it will be a fun ride. Thanks for being part of ZDNet.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
