The advent of internet marketing and “instant online car insurance quotes” was most definitely a turning point in how car insurance was compared, marketed and purchased. The first player to the game was Progressive Insurance. I remember it well [major digression coming....] Since 1991, I have been fascinated by the internet as we knew it today, but years earlier a dear friend named Paul- who went to U.C. Berkeley introduced me to dial-up message boards. This was back in 1986 if I remember correctly. We would place our push button phone’s receiver into a special cradle connected to the computer. We would then dial into the board and download the messages. Our replies would be posted similarly and before we knew it- we were hooked.
Anyhow, my earliest recollections of shopping for car insurance online involved visiting Progressive’s site where I requested an online rate. This was way before the decision to tie credit ratings into the purchase of car insurance and the process was pretty smooth. Then along came a few others like Electric Insurance, 21st Century and a few others. The buggy interfaces soon gave way to improved versions and better features. Then Geico came onto the scene and somwhere inbetween aggregators like Insweb.com, Netquote.com, 4freequotes.com, insureme.com(used to be insurance shopping network) to name a few. The line became a bit blurry between the aggregator sites – which worked with both agents and carriers – and the actual insurance carrier web sites. Most have thrived, weathering the bubble burst of 1999-2000, but one of them-{begin rant} Insweb.com has fared so poorly in such a tremendous marketplace, that one has to wonder how they went public in the first place. How do you spend 150 million plus over 12 years and not figure out how to turn a profit? This eludes me. If only someone had invested $100 million in my ideas, the game would be over… {end rant} 
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The two largest aggregators- netquote and insureme are now owned by Bankrate.com under the banner BankRateInsurance. That must have been a tough transition for they were the two largest companies in the space with very different philosophies. The question is how the integration and overlap will affect the combined company and whether the strategies will mesh. Make no mistake, with north of $250 million invested, they will have no choice but to play nice! Their expectation levels have to be staggering. With Google reportedly coming into comparison shopping, this will be interesting to watch.
Since those days in 1994, the market has matured considerably and you can now make changes online, purchase insurance online using a credit card, even get a loan online, purchase a car right there, then insure it a few minutes later. Simply amazing in terms of the amount of legwork that has been removed from the average consumer’s search. It’s getting late.. will continue this line of thinking tomorrow.