How 1990s Vacuum-Packed Steaks Could Help Bring Ethereum Its Early Majority
How AOL explained the internet to the masses and the lessons blockchain can learn for mainstream adoption.
In 1962, sociologist Everett Rogers proposed new ideas spread through five successively larger groups of people: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.
Crudely speaking, Innovators and Early Adopters are small groups curious about new technology and willing/able to tolerate uncertainty and change (and hard-fork reschedulings! 😜) in pursuit of a product’s stable development. Early Majorities, on the other hand, do not have the willingness or capacity to tolerate high risk and their use of a product might signal a tipping point — true adoption by average users. Late Majorities and (the unfortunately named) Laggards are more resistant to new ideas and, therefore, the last to adopt.
Ethereum has its Innovators and Early Adopters. These are the ones who — driven by an idea — have done a phenomenal job building, developing, testing, mining, implementing, breaking, fixing, learning and teaching this glorious social experiment known as Ethereum. These innovators and early adopters are the ones who’ve captured the world’s attention repeatedly over the past few years.
The crucial question is whether Ethereum can maintain and modulate that attention into sustained trust from the Early Majority. Why is that so difficult? In part, because we are a very young community still working out mission-critical issues. But mainly because the concepts underpinning Ethereum (and most blockchain protocols) are so dramatically different from our contemporary surroundings, it’s very difficult to explain to anyone succinctly. To truly gain the trust of an Early Majority individual with something as unusual as Ethereum, users need to see, interact, and play with it to truly understand its potential.
As there is nothing new under the sun, we can look back to an early, massively successful marketing campaign by a young start-up named America Online (AOL). AOL, over the course of 10 years, printed so many AOL Installation CD-ROMs that, at one point, 50% of all the CDs produced worldwide (2.2 billion in 1997) had an AOL logo on it.
It’s a tale made possible by the bizarro excesses of the 1990s. It involves AOL Installation Trial CDs, Blockbuster Video, Ted Turner, CNN, Internet Archive and Omaha Steaks. And it just might help blockchain — Ethereum specifically — create a toehold for an Early Majority.
Some of our younger friends may be wondering, Why would you need a CD-ROM to install AOL Instant Messenger? Well, believe it or not, AOL was actually way more than just a messaging system in the 1990s. For the privileged few comfortable enough to have a PC, modem, credit card, and working phone line, it was The Internet (back when you had to capitalize the term “the internet”).
But it didn’t start that way. In fact, when Jan Brandt came to AOL in 1993, they were well behind competitors Prodigy and CompuServe in terms of customers. “[I]n 1992,” former CEO Steve Case posted on a Quora thread (!?) “we had less than 200,000 subscribers.” Brandt needed to find a scrappy way for AOL to standout from more successful competitors who spent those heady 1990s marketing budgets on flashy TV advertisements. Not only did they not have the budget, Brandt felt traditional advertising could not fully capture the then-unique experience of online services such as e-mail, message boards, and early e-commerce.
It’s difficult for us goldfish surrounded by the digital water of today to understand it hasn’t always been there. To get a sense of what people understood about online services, take a look at this AOL TV spot and, for the uninitiated, the notorious “Today” Show clip:
Brandt realized users needed to see AOL themselves, directly without an intermediary. So she created a campaign to send single 3.5” disks with trial versions of AOL pre-loaded with a certain number of “free” hours on the service. Those disks would be delivered, mass-market style, to consumers via the mail. Brandt has claimed the open rate was 20% (“a home-run was considered 2–3%”). An impressive, if self-reported, number.
The campaign was starting to produce results when they switched from disks to CDs. Compared to floppy disks, CDs were, as the name suggests, more compact as well as more physically resilient. A CD in a cardboard sleeve could be treated almost as roughly as a branded plastic cup given away en-masse at public events. And that’s exactly what Brandt started doing.
If you were halfway cognizant in America at this time, you could score an AOL “Trial Version” CD-ROM disk practically anywhere. If you had access to a CD-ROM connected to a phone line, AOL wanted to make sure you encountered this in your daily life. They were everywhere. Placed as inserts in magazines, given away with purchases — Brandt littered the country indiscriminately. She also discovered the compounding effect of partnering with other companies for distribution.
One of the first successful partnerships came when AOL got Blockbuster to give away trial CDs with movie rentals. After it was discovered the CDs could be frozen and thawed without significant damage, AOL partnered with Omaha Steaks to slip the promotional CDs in with the frozen steaks they shipped all over the country.
Before this, Innovators and Early Adopters of the internet were mainly academics, government employees or hobbyist. They had technical support as well as a mandate or a curiosity to explore, pushing them through the technical hurdles. By sending out all these CDs, however, AOL lowered the barrier to entry. It emboldened less-tech-savvy individuals with a CD-ROM and connected phone lines to try this newly-born, poorly-understood technology.
As blockchain developers and enthusiasts in different arenas, we need to be finding the (environmentally and economically friendly) equivalent of AOL trial CDs. For commercial success, sure, but also for the health and longevity of our communities.
Look at pictures from recent blockchain conferences and you will see a lack of diversity. Tech, in general, is notorious for this but niche tech like blockchain exaggerates those already-pathetic ratios. It’s certainly getting better but the prominent developers and leaders in our space are men.
Why is this a problem? The promise of blockchain is the collective power of many diverse individuals coordinating through strong distributed networks. We definitely are developing the tools and protocols for these networks but the real innovation of Ethereum is the trustless mediation of concerns which allows people from all walks of life to interact. If a resilient blockchain network is one that contains many actors with varying interests, a network with monocultural interests is brittle and weak.
It’s also very possible the people who will deliver our much-needed scalability and UX solutions are not currently in the Ethereum community. Perhaps the Innovators and Early Adopters that have brought us to this point can go no further without the assistance of fresh minds, ideas, and perspectives.
Brandt’s promotional CD campaign — which allowed users to actually use the service before purchasing it — was massively successful. The subscriber base grew rapidly, AOL leapfrogged over its competitors and the company became synonymous with the internet itself. At its height, it’s been reported AOL was signing up a new user every six seconds through its trial CDs. It would grow from 200,000 users to 25 million, according to then-CEO Steve Case. In a matter of years, AOL was valued at $150 billion. It may be difficult to appreciate now in this era where growth performance is measured on a logarithmic scale, but these were incredibly impressive numbers at the time.
Brandt was worried though. Not about AOL’s servers, which were routinely crashing with the flood of subscribers she brought in, but about her competition getting smart to the game. In an interview with the Internet History Podcast, Brandt explains:
Someone once asked me what kept me up at night. I said, ‘I wake up every morning worried that I’m going to see Prodigy or CompuServe using the discs the way that we’re using them. That I’m going to see it stuck on the front of a magazine or see it in the mail.’ And the thing that was really interesting… I gave very few interviews. I would never have talked to them [the press] the way I’m talking to you about it now. Because I felt like I was sitting there with the secret sauce.
Ted Leonsis [another AOL executive] was once on a panel with someone from CompuServe. And the guy from CompuServe said to Ted, ‘You guys are crazy. And that person running marketing has gotta be a nutcase with the amount of money that you’re spending on these discs.’
And Ted comes back and reports this to me. And I said, ‘Next time someone says that, agree that I’m a dumb broad, and that you’ve been trying to get me fired from the company for a long time.’ And the reason for that, really, is, I couldn’t believe that they weren’t trying it.
To Brandt, it was simple: People didn’t know what the internet was and she had created a low barrier-to-entry mechanism which allowed them to actually see how the internet worked. That low-barrier-to entry (the first-time user experience) was so crucial in her mind that Brandt refused to let engineers expand the installation software beyond one disc.
I was crazed about that. There was a lot of struggle internally, because the software [to install AOL] was becoming more and more complicated. […] And, yeah, I wouldn’t allow it to go on to two floppies. Because, it’s all about the consumer, stupid. It really is. And making it easy and taking away barriers is what good marketing has to do. I really felt that having it on two floppies, and have to manipulate that would be a barrier. We’re talking about back in days when I did focus group research–and we’re watching this–and someone took a computer mouse and is pointing it at the computer like a remote control. And one person put it on the floor and tried to use it like a sewing machine pedal.
First-time onboarding and interaction on the blockchain similarly needs to be more accessible to gain an Early Majority. Blockchain doesn’t work for people if there are no people using it. Despite the wonderful work of software like Metamask, the Mist Browser, and Status, the technical barrier to entry is still very high. Attempting to show someone how to, say, sync a full node on their laptop is about as enjoyable as me giving them a DIY root canal while simultaneously asking them to recall their most traumatic childhood experiences. (And, some of the time, about as successful.)
At ConsenSys Academy, being at the forefront of blockchain education, we see firsthand the tension between Early Adopters and Early Majority when it comes to accessibility. An Early Adopter is typically stubborn in their achievement of a goal and will search, ask and fume endlessly to overcome obstacles. An Early Majority participant, on the other hand, can be easily spooked, angered and turned off by breakage. Engineers may sympathize with the term “breaking changes,” but a lay-person’s (understandable) response is, “Why am I learning this now if it will break tomorrow?”
We are doing our part by developing workshops that give participants an easy, low-barrier way to generate an Ethereum account, get test ether, install Metamask, send transactions and deploy simple smart contracts. We’ll soon be introducing a platform capturing all these ideas at SXSW this year.
Austin Griffith’s Burner Wallet implementation and Alex Van de Sande’s Universal Login are also examples of great work in this area and it seems as though the Ethereum community is seeing the need for better user experience (UX). DevCon 4 had daily, hours-long UX Audits, daily UX breakout sessions and prominent UX talks such as “Mechanism Design Meets UX,” and “Zen Mind in UX Dapp Design.”
We need people to understand the foundational concepts of blockchain and create smooth UX. A subset of those new participants also need to be compelled to dig into blockchain in a meaningful way. While Academy’s Blockchain Basics Coursera course, Blockchain Basics e-book, and Ethereum 101 workshop discuss fundamentals for non-developers, our In-Person Education and Online Developer Course provide deeper technical experiences meant to guide programmers deeper into the ecosystem.
In February 2000, AOL, a software company, spent $164 billion to acquire Time Warner, a film, television, cable and publishing juggernaut that included HBO, CNN, Warner Bros, Turner Broadcasting System, and DC Comics. The exuberant deal would be the death knell for the Dot-Com bubble, which popped in March 2000. According to Wikipedia, by October 2002 the crash had claimed $5 trillion in the stock market, 78% of the NASDAQ-100s value and 52% of all dot-com companies. The heady, frothy, irrational economy — the one that had allowed Jan Brandt to spend billions (each trial user cost $35 to acquire) to spray the globe with toxic, plastic discs that now probably have their own zip code in the Pacific Trash Island — was over and it disemboweled AOL on the way out of the door.
Fred Wilson, who reportedly lost 90% of his wealth in the crash, has said of the dot-com era:
‘Nothing important has ever been built without irrational exuberance’. [Y]ou need some of this mania to cause investors to open up their pocketbooks and finance the building of the railroads or the automobile or aerospace industry or whatever. […] [M]uch of it was invested in a very high throughput backbone for the Internet, and lots of software that works, and databases and server structure. All that stuff has allowed what we have today, which has changed all our lives.
It’s debatable (at best) whether Wilson’s glib tone is appropriate given the enormous amount of personal tragedy boom-and-bust cycles categorically generate. That aside, his point about dot-com financing the foundational infrastructure for our time is true.
As something percolates up from Innovators to Early Adopters to Early Majority to Late Majority (do the Laggards ever adopt?), it gains with each stage more stability. Successful navigation seems to require a symbiotic relationship with the new users acquired and the scaling issues their presence create. New participants are drawn to a platform, at a critical mass they handicap it, then they learn it to help fix it.
It is interesting to note that Wilson, after being wiped out in the dot-com crash, re-emerged in 2004 to start the VC firm Union Square Ventures, which made astounding early-stage investments in Zynga, Twitter, Etsy, Indeed, Tumblr, Twilio, MongoDB and many others. Wikipedia says “the firm has had a billion-dollar exit” every year from 2011–2017 and calls it “one of the top returning venture capital funds in the world.”
In May 2013, Union Square Ventures led the Series A investment round for Coinbase, crowning Fred Wilson as an established tech tycoon willing to talk about the potential of cryptocurrency. Coinbase would go on to provide crypto-payment processing for Stripe, Paypal, and others. It was one of the first services that streamlined using fiat to purchase cryptocurrency. Effectively, it became a crypto-gateway drug.
There’s an apocryphal tale I recently heard about Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong. It’s from a while back when Bitcoin was under $100 and still a curiosity to most. Frequently, during a limited period of time, Armstrong would be talking crypto to someone and casually give them a paper wallet he had loaded with a quarter bitcoin. Small potatoes in that day but it gave the person an extra layer of engagement with the technology. The interaction encouraged them to dig deeper, learn more about the technology and, maybe, tell someone else. The amount Armstrong would have given away is in the millions now but that increased valuation occurred, at least in minor part because, of actions like his.
If we understand Bitcoin to be a trustless store-of-value model, it benefits from people simply holding it. Ethereum extends the Bitcoin model, introducing more flexible computation and therefore requires more engagement than just HODLing.
There are may be some of you reading this who understand blockchain, recognize its enormous potential for the world and, possibly, code Solidity once in a while. You may, however, still be figuring out what WebAssembly actually is. Some of you might get crossed-eyed when looking at a raw hex-encoded bytestream output representing an Ethereum transaction. You might, for example, rather chew glass than consider the technical and existential quandary of pseudo-randomness in beacon chains.
For those of us in this camp, let me encourage you to consider a few questions: How can we onboard people to blockchain and Ethereum? How can we get those people inspired to run full nodes? What does that look like in different degrees? To an activist in the Southern United States? A dissident in Saudi Arabia? To the head of a household in South Korea?
In a moment when Google and Facebook have banned crypto-related ads, what’s the common space where we can gather and share this information? What are the equivalents of the AOL trial CD for the blockchain world today?
This post was written by Coogan Brennan. Coogan works as a technical trainer for ConsenSys Academy doing in-person education around the world.
For more about Jan Brandt and AOL, please check out these wonderful stories:
- “You’ve Got Mail: A History of AOL’s Free Trial CDs“ Mental Floss
- “She Gave the World A Billion AOL CDs” Internet History Podcast
- Recent AOL Quora thread featuring Jan Brandt and Steve Case.
AOL Trial CD images sourced from the Internet Archive’s delightful AOL CD-ROM Collection
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit consensys.net. Keep up with our new products, upcoming trainings, and other fun updates here.
