Frank glanced at his watch. There were still fifteen minutes until noon Eastern Time.
"Prepare a breaking-news graphic," Frank ordered. "Black background, white text, keep the same visual style as the teaser posters. Put only one sentence on it: Two hours online, clicks break 100 million. At exactly 12 noon, hang it in the top headline slot on the go.com homepage."
The technicians quickly typed the line into the layout software.
Noon.
After finishing his sandwich, Richard refreshed the go.com homepage out of habit.
He wanted to check the afternoon financial news briefs.
At the top of the page, a visually striking banner had replaced the original mailbox GG.
"Two hours online, clicks break 100 million."
Richard froze for a moment.
One hundred million clicks.
In 1996, this was a number enough to make any traditional media outlet shudder.
It meant that in the past two hours, a considerable portion of Internet users across America had left browsing traces on this website.
This breaking news was not only posted on the homepage, it was also simultaneously pushed into the news feeds of major financial terminals.
The Nasdaq trading floor.
Watching the news pop up on their Bloomberg Terminals, the traders were briefly stunned, then erupted into deafening shouts.
"Buy SVOL! Buy at market!"
"Twenty thousand shares! Twenty-seven US dollars!"
The line on the stock chart pulled out a steep bullish candlestick.
At this moment, the bubble of the Internet economy and real value intertwined.
Capital did not need to understand how the underlying code was written. They only needed to understand the logic of monetizing traffic.
A platform that possessed millions of highly sticky users, controlled the first gateway to the Internet, and could provide a full suite of services from information to communication had commercial value far beyond Netscape,