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Inventions that were going to change the world – but didn’t

6. The e-card

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Newscom/file
A US Postal Service employee grabs a pile of holiday greeting cards and other letters at the processing and distribution center in Capitol Heights, Maryland.

Shuttered Hallmark stores, cobwebbed Thank You cards, and the demise of the written word – all fears the greeting card industry had with the early Internet boom in e-card use.

In some ways, it is hard to see why e-cards didn’t demolish the greeting card industry. They are essentially a silly flash animation or adorable baby animal to wish anything from birthday greetings to cheers on Administrative Assistant day – a clear predecessor to the popularity LolCatz and the new wave of animated GIFs. Plus, they are cheaper than sending an actual greeting card and fit better in our digital-oriented world.

But e-cards ended up another casualty of the dot-com bust and the rise of social media. Take the case of Blue Mountain Arts. Blue Mountain Arts, an immensely popular free e-card website was sold to Excite@Home, an online customizable home page service, for $780 million in 1999, who cited the website’s ability to successfully generate ad revenue while providing free e-cards as proof of its immense worth.

Sound too good to be true? That is because it was. Two years later, Excite@Home was only worth $150 million, and sold Blue Mountain Arts to American Greetings for $35 million. (Three weeks later Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy).  

But dot-com hubris wasn’t the e-cards’ only foe: Social media has also pulled business away from e-card companies. Facebook offers both reminders of your friends’ birthdays and a continually evolving array of birthday “gifts” from a birthday cake emoticon to Starbucks gift cards. Not to mention, many Internet users deem a “Happy Birthday!” wall post an adequate (and cost-efficient) online birthday greeting.

Today, most of the big greeting card companies, such as Hallmark and American Greetings, have online counterparts, usually with an annual or monthly subscription, but physical card sales are still going strong. The Greeting Card Association estimates 6.5 billion cards are sold per year in the United States. That's down from 7 billion per year the GCA had been estimating per year in the last decade, but still quite a bundle of cards. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

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