Kinda Sad Ain't It?

I got started online in 2005 and it actually seemed like I got in during the glory days of online business. There were new webmasters that were totally green that were shooting up in the serps and making money pretty quick out of the gate. The economy was strong and adsense/affiliate payouts were great.

In a way, it kinda seemed like it was that perfect moment where the big players were still totally clueless about everything. I remembered hearing something like Office Depot didn't rank for anything in the SERPS because of its website structure and the only money they spent on PPC was on the keyword "Office Depot"

Then the economy softened, affiliate companies went bust, adsense payouts shrunk, and Google had some big updates. All the sudden, people that were getting used to making some money online saw their income go "POOF". These were people that were relying strictly on Google traffic to Adsense income AND people that thought they actually were diversified.

There are 2 things that are very sad about that:

1) A lot of these sites actually were getting quite a bit of "free" traffic and they have nothing to show for it...no customers, no email list, no affiliates, etc.

2) They still don't realize where they have gone wrong. The only question they can ask is "How can i recover from Penguin updates?!?!?!"

I consider myself fortunate because I think early on I learned some important lessons that really struck a cord from me:

1) From Corey Rudl, start an email list. I did that right out of the gate.

2) From Dan Kennedy I learned "Never be reliant on ONE thing. One customer, one key employee, one traffic source, one supplier"

3) From Rich Schefren who taught at a Stompernet conference and said that it's ok to leverage the free stuff, but to build a business at the same time so you don't have to rely on the free stuff. Because one day, that stuff isn't going to be free. Competition will get more fierce.

I think I look around at all the people that, at one time, were successful online and see that they made all these mistakes and now are throwing in the towel. I don't know, to me it's sad. It's kinda like seeing some dude from HS that was fun-loving and funny and now you see them 20 years later and they are out of shape and down on life.

The good news is that there is a whole crop of people making money, but I don't buy that it's anywhere near the success that we were seeing in the mid-2000's.

What do you think? When you look around at your peers that started at the same time as you, what's the outlook?