I was a professional software developer for about ten years, years which happened to coincide with the early internet boom. The living was easy, so easy compared to today. If you got bored, you could kick your boss in the nuts and have a higher-paying job lined up before there was time to clean out your desk. Management generally couldn’t tell the difference between when you were goofing off and when you were running the company. The trick was to run the company and goof off at the same time. You’d still get a raise without even asking for it. Such was the demand for talent back then, even uncredentialed talent like mine.

I spent eleven months with an outfit called MeasureCast. This would have been in about 1999. MeasureCast was the first startup I worked with, and we had a money-making angle in the time of opportunity. Internet radio, something like what YouTube is today, was a new and rapidly-growing market. As in many emerging markets at the time, there were two major competing technology stacks: whoever got there first, and Microsoft. Real Media got there first and developed the RealPlayer, the first commercially-viable online audio streaming application. Microsoft came after with the Windows Media Player, which we referred to as WiMP.

At that time, there were no “major media platforms” online. Google was the best search engine; that’s all Google was. They weren’t evil yet; their main user base was geeks needing technical information. Wikipedia and Facebook and all the rest were unheard of, undreamt of.

Anyone who could buy a little bandwidth could run an internet radio station and charge for advertising. People were doing it, but it was a new economy and nobody knew how to price the advertising. Howard Stern went on the radio and complained about the situation. Here was this rapidly-expanding market and nobody could figure out what to pay anybody.

Supposedly, the future CEO of MeasureCast was in the shower, or at least in the bathroom, when he heard Stern’s broadcast. And he got a bright idea. Internet isn’t the same as broadcast media. Internet is transactional. Why not develop a service that can log all the transactions in a database for truly accurate analysis and reporting? Why not measure the audience?

That’s what we did. And we did it in a non-evil way. It never occurred to us to try to sell the audience; indeed our data practices wouldn’t have enabled it. We did some demographic analysis, but we did it in an above-board and consensual way. We weren’t screwing anybody. All we were selling was the numbers.

We got partnered up with some of the bigger stations, and for a while there we were the only people in the internet radio business who actually knew what was going on. There was no competition coming up from behind, but there was what you might call a legacy competitor, Arbitron.

Arbitron was ubiquitous, basically a national monopoly on market analysis of traditional broadcast radio. Arbitron is now a subsidiary of Nielsen, the industry standard for market analysis of television since time immemorial. Arbitron was a multi-billion dollar business with headquarters in LA at the time.

Arbitron was not on a technological footing to get anywhere near us. Their audience sampling had been conducted at cost and with some inaccuracy, by means of surveys and the like. Suddenly here’s a market where you have a competitor whose data is absolutely hard, and he seems to be getting it for free. There was no way for Arbitron to compete. Sure, they were big and we were small, but then again a party balloon is way bigger than a needle. We were grinning ear to ear, working round the clock.

Came a time when Arbitron had to make a public comment about the threat we posed, in some industry journal or other. “We’ll outlast them,” they said.

And they did. Here’s how: they made internet radio illegal.

Arbitron was founded in 1949, just a little too late to have done market research for Goebbels. Music publishers, show producers, and broadcast networks hung on their every word for decades. Rumor in 1999 was the company was worth $2 billion.

Power and money find each other, and Arbitron had power. They knew everybody from Roy Disney to Sonny Bono. They could afford lobbyists, junkets, etc.

They changed Federal copyright law so that users of internet radio had to pay a royalty of five cents per track per listen. That’s not a typo: that actually happened in early 2000. That measure killed every single internet radio station instantly. Not only was the royalty not market-sustainable, there was no way to collect such royalties at the time. There still isn’t one. Perhaps that’s because no-one needs it.

Real Media went under. A round of funding fell through at the eleventh hour. I was laid off in the first round, the others held on for a while. MeasureCast ended up being acquired by Arbitron in a fire sale.

And now GoOgle makes shitloads of money by charging for advertising to view unauthorized copyrighted content. They opened up that revenue stream just as soon as they could assume control.

Going up against an incumbent is tough.