Frank picked up a pen and signed his name on the contract.
"Give them full-width banners on the Finance and Tech sections," Frank said, pushing the contract back. "Since they're bringing the money to us, we need to provide service that justifies the price. Filter out the user data for those who have searched for 'high-fidelity audio' and 'home theater,' and target them with Sony's GGs."
Bill took the contract and left, satisfied.
A few days later.
San Francisco Bay Area.
Richard logged onto go.com and, as usual, opened the Finance section to check the latest news from the Federal Reserve.
Once the page finished loading, a highly futuristic banner GG appeared at the very top.
It was a promotional image for Sony's newest Trinitron TV.
The image was crisp, and the slogan was clean and direct.
Richard happened to be looking to replace his old CRT television at home.
He moved his mouse and clicked the banner.
A new tab opened in his browser, taking him directly to Sony's official North American website.
The page design, while not as fluid as go.com's, presented the core information at a glance.
Richard entered his zip code, and the system quickly displayed the addresses of the three nearest authorized Sony dealers. The guide to after-sales service points was also placed in a prominent position.
The experience was remarkably smooth.
At the same time, the network maintenance department at Sony's Tokyo headquarters was in chaos.
"Server load is too high!" a technician shouted to his supervisor. "Requests from North America have surged five hundredfold in the last ten minutes!"
The supervisor rushed to the screen, staring at the traffic curve that was shooting straight up.
"Are we under attack?"
"It's not an attack!" The technician tapped the keyboard rapidly, pulling up the logs. "These are all legitimate user requests. The source addresses all point to the go.com redirect link!"
Sony had underestimated Silicon Valley Online's ability to drive traffic. The GG Slot they had purchased for a huge sum had, within its first hour online, completely overwhelmed Sony's poor server.
Honda was reporting his progress to Nobuyuki Idei when he received the call from the Technical Department.
After listening to the report on the other end of the line, Honda froze in place.
"What's wrong?" Nobuyuki Idei asked.
"Our official website has crashed," Honda said, swallowing hard. "The traffic from go.com was too much; the servers couldn't handle it."
A brief silence fell over the meeting room.
Nobuyuki Idei rubbed his temples.
He had paid for GG, and in doing so, had crippled his own website. It sounded like a joke, yet it was a stark testament to how terrifying this monster called Silicon Valley Online truly was.
"Add more servers and bandwidth," Idei ordered, his tone unreadable. "If the traffic is coming in, we have to catch it."
News of the Sony website crash quickly spread through Silicon Valley's tech circles.
It became the perfect sales pitch for the go.com GG Sales Department.
"See what happened to Sony?" Bill Campbell asked potential clients, using Sony's misfortune as a selling point. "If your servers aren't up to the task, don't you dare buy a headline GG from Silicon Valley Online. It'll kill you."
This reverse marketing was unexpectedly effective.
Major brands not only increased their ad spend on go.com but also boosted sales for HP and IBM servers. Everyone was frantically expanding their capacity to brace for the traffic tsunami Silicon Valley Online was about to unleash.
The Internet's closed-loop ecosystem was thus forcibly established by go.com in an almost brutal fashion.
On the Nasdaq Trading Floor, the green numbers behind the stock ticker SVOL continued to climb.
Wall Street traders had photocopied the news of Sony's GG ad campaign over a hundred times, passing the copies around between trading stations.
"Even their arch-rival is sending them money!" a trader shouted into the phone, slamming a photocopy onto his desk. "What are you still waiting for? A pullback? This stock isn't pulling back! Buy! Buy at market price!"
Silicon Valley Online's ability to attract capital had received the most authoritative endorsement after Sony's order. Even commercial competitors had to obediently open their wallets in the face of absolute traffic.
Redwood City, Silicon Valley Online Headquarters.
Frank Marshall tossed a document labeled "European Championship Special Section Operating Data" onto his large solid wood desk.
The paper slid a short distance, coming to a stop next to his coffee cup.
Compared to the nearly absurdly steep traffic growth curve of the Atlanta Olympics Special Section, the line graph for the European Championship was far too gentle.
The daily unique visitors remained within a fixed range, showing no explosive growth. The GG click-through rate was only a third of that of the Olympics Zone.
The editorial director in charge of content aggregation sat across the desk, flipping through the memo in his hand.
"The information dimension is too single," the director stated, presenting the objective facts. "The European Championship has a fixed schedule, with only a few matches each day. Fans don't need to sift through a complex table of dozens of different events' broadcast times like they do for the Olympic Games. They only care about who won. Once the match ends, the post-game reviews from various news agencies are released. All we can do is move these articles into the special zone. Other than being a few hours faster than traditional print media, we can't provide any more value-added services."
Frank took a sip of his coffee without interrupting.
"Also, the willingness of users in Europe to interact is very low," the director turned a page of the memo. "We set up a score prediction and best player vote in the special zone, but very few people participated. This is completely incomparable to the scene in the Olympics Zone, where netizens were frantically customizing their own exclusive channels."
Frank put down his coffee cup and leaned back in his chair.
This was all within his expectations.
Europe's Internet infrastructure lagged behind North America's, and its online user base was already small. More importantly, football on this continent had deeply rooted offline social attributes.
At this moment, in the West End of London, inside a traditional English pub called the "Red Lion," the air was a mixture of cheap ale, sweat, and fish and chips. A CRT television on the wall was broadcasting the marquee match between England and Scotland.
Dozens of burly fans crowded around the narrow bar, pints in hand, erupting in deafening curses or cheers with every tackle on the pitch.
In the corner of the bar, a young university student with glasses tried to share the go.com match analysis he had found on his college computer and printed out. His companion merely glanced at the dense English text on the paper before impatiently shoving him aside, continuing to flip off the referee on the television screen.
To these traditional fans, football belonged to the grass, beer, and noisy street corners, not a cold computer screen.
Frank was well aware of this cultural barrier.
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