There are 1 billion Internet users worldwide right now. The remaining 5 billion humans on the planet are not connected. Right now the UN is working on getting the next billion users connected. The challenges include poverty, infrastructure and interference by various governments.
For domainers and the online advertising world the implications of this are huge, including:
- The enormous potential for growth on the Internet. There are a limited number of domains out there and those of us in the first billion own most of them.
- Potential ad spend growth online is far larger than any current predictions which are based on the existing user base.
- Sites and domains targeting global audiences with very different worldviews will thrive.
- Digital products will be the major growth sector because they do not require shipping and they can be priced to fit the demographics of a geo-location. The downside of this is piracy.
- Forget intellectual property as a business model. The only IP that will be protectable is your domain. Your content, ideas and business concepts will be copied over and over. Domains will become the currency that determines value on the web.
- Dot coms are the gold standard. As the web grows and piracy flourishes money will retreat to the gold standard. This always happens in times of great change.
- English, IMHO, will still be the primary language online, however processing power and bandwidth are going to mean real-time translation of site content. Think about this- a Mandarin speaker/reader visits one of my sites and Google auto-translates it on the fly. Can we auto-translate domains? I’m in flying car territory here…
- It took ten years for the web to hit one billion users. I’m guessing the second billion will hit a lot faster.
My biggest takeaway? Domains are the only safe harbor online, the biggest growth opportunity. Domaining is a teeny-tiny business right now. The ‘players’ argue amongst themselves over silly imagined slights and the entire domain blogworld is limited to a half dozen blogs. Watch for the big guys to enter this world, the Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffetts and hedgefund managers. When that happens our little crew of domain millionaires will find their world dramatically altered (of course they will get very rich in the process).
Here’s a scenario to ponder: What if Amazon got into the domain business? They have virtually every product imaginable to promote and huge amounts of user-generated content to leverage. They have enormous scalability and unlimited resources. It’s a thought…