2011 Internet Trends: Equal Shares for the World in Business and the Internet

Commerce and the Internet — Two Spaces Slowly Becoming an Equal Ground for Everyone

The international market is catching up to local U.S. companies. Although Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook still have the largest market values and annual revenues respectively, Chinese businesses like Baidu, Tencent, Netease and Alibaba.com are soon catching up. Baidu is at number 5, surpassing eBay, Yahoo! and Salesforce.com. Russian companies are not to be outdone too, with Yandex and Mail.ru coming in at 15 and 19. Mary Meeker, one of U.S.’s most famous and trusted business and Internet analysts, notes that U.S. companies have to remain strong and competitive since commercial players from other countries are going full speed ahead to the top of the business world.

Other countries are also beginning to participate in the Internet. Little by little, year after year, the Internet is welcoming new users from other countries, which further expands and makes the world wide web more different and diverse from earlier times. Global users continue to pour in and use leading websites more than their U.S. counterparts. In Google, there are approximately 800M international web visitors for every 200M American users. When countries are ranked in the Internet user category, it was found out that the United States come in at the sixth place, being eclipsed by Nigeria at third place and Iran at fifth. Surprising, isn’t it?

This blasts the idea that the U.S. users are particularly active in social media. When compared to statistics from other countries, U.S. users are also surpassed when it comes to social networking site visits. At the tenth place, U.S. netizens log only about 6.8 hours per month while Israel users, who came out on top, spends 11.1 hours. Turkey and Russia also rank higher, as well as contenders from Latin America countries. According to Meeker, “One of things that are important for us investors and all of us company builders increasingly need to look at these other markets around the world and figure out what’s going on and are there things that apply to the markets that we primarily work in or are there things we need to do to get into those markets.”

So, what do these data actually mean to us simple retailers running our business in local U.S. communities? This indicates that businesses do not have to limit their scope of business in the small scale, as in only on our local online community channels. We can actually reach out to other customers overseas if we learn how to fully utilize the Internet. The web is slowly becoming a very wide place for everybody. If things continue on as they are five to ten years later, we might have nearly the whole world connected online. Now, that’s a huge market waiting for us. Let us start to consider expanding our commercial horizons and do business with people from other countries. Wouldn’t that be exciting and amazing, at the same time? Let’s all go for it, and make our business go online!

 

Reference:

Information from this article is taken from Mary Meeker’s “Internet Trends,” a speech which she gave in Web 2.0 Summit 2011