As Gary Hamel and Jeff Sampler told business magazine Fortune in 1998, “Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company’s name on it.

Somewhere out there is a competitor, unborn and unknown, that will render your business model obsolete.”

In the digital age, the Internet is that bullet for companies and industries across the board. Here are five traditional models that might not survive an online world:

The American University. All signs point to cheap online education as a major threat to the university model. The U.S. Department of Education recently released a study that found a significant amount of online education strategies are better for student-achievement than a bricks-and-mortar, face-to-face environment. An April article in The Chronicle of Higher Education said universities have a financial weakness in lower-division undergraduate education — move those classes online, and the model begins to unravel. In a sign of that trend, the Department of Education is planning to make free online classes available for community colleges nationwide. Think the Internet can’t replicate a classroom in an all-virtual setting? At some level, it already is. It would be a disturbing trend for traditional universities to lose stability because of it.

Porn. A 2009 MSNBC article reported that adult film companies are under increasing pressure from two competitors familiar to the newspaper industry: free online content driving prices down and user-generated content. This is probably a bigger deal than it seems, since it’s mathematical that an increasingly under-regulated, underground adult film industry could lead to more child pornography.

Investigative journalism. Even after producing the Pulitzer-Prize-winning series on the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the East Valley Tribune cut staff and production days and ceased circulation. The best for-profit investigative media in the country continue to lose business since the old model of investigative reporting was essentially subsidized by the cheaper-to-produce news. The good news is that nonprofit journalism like ProPublica seems to be flourishing — it’s the best we can hope for because it’s unlikely that objective investigative journalism will ever be profitable.

Non-invasive marketing. Every successful online marketing campaign uses detailed user information to be effective, with good reason — banner ads are hardly effective. The old adage that half of one’s advertising goes to waste is growingly obsolete, and we can all expect an increase in privacy-invasive marketing that targets our personal data and available history. This is probably a worthy trade-off since we pay with our privacy for less than what it would cost to actually buy our online content.

TV shows. The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that Hulu, the leader in online television, makes about 18 cents off every person who watches an episode of “The Simpsons.” That number is a disaster compared with the 54 cents FOX Broadcasting makes from someone watching the show on a primetime Sunday night. As long as the Internet is the future of television, TV shows are going to see enormous losses, and a 66 percent drop looks unsustainable.

Losing most of these business models could be considered progress — the benefits of an online world will probably eventually justify the demise of every company that the Internet destroys. But it’s going to take a lot to replace the status quo.

Reach Matt at matt.culbertson@asu.edu.