e "locked out of all types of media for the fourth quarter" (Dennis, 1999, p. 14). Translation: Dot-com startups had purchased media space and time to such a degree that not enough media were available for conventional advertisers to market their wares. That gave rise to various forms of Internet advertising, although the bloom came off the cost-benefit-return rose relatively quickly (Gilbert, 2000). Amazon.com was an extraordinary success that persists today as a stable company. It began in 1995 as a warehouser/online retailer of popular books and gradually added additional books to its inventory. It quickly publicized itself as having opened a "million-dollar bookstore" on the Internet (Amazon.com, 1995, p. 71). On the whole, the company's business model was solid, and it evolved from a purely "click" to a "brick and click" business model (2002, p. 31). That is, it used the Internet as a support mechanism for a fairly standard mail-order shipping operation. Amazon.com endured year-over-year losses between 1999 and 2003 that could be attributed in large pa
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