The economy sputtered along this year, challenging every organization. However, there were some genuine pockets of growth online, both in terms of users and revenue. Now that 2009 is over, 2010 will start the hype anew... Is this the year for social networking? How about mobile commerce? Will the government finally move towards full online RFP systems? Where should you be focusing?
Before you start spending your hard fought budget, let's take a look back at the true growth areas in 2009. Not only does this help confirm last year's actions, it will help solidify any plans for next year. We'll start with the core elements of the Internet -- speed, cost, and users -- and build from there. The changes here can be summed up in three words... faster, cheaper, and smarter.
Faster -- U.S. average internet speeds actually increased in 2009 according to hosting giant Akamai. In fact, over 24% of all connections in the U.S. are now over 5MB in speed. Combine this with the fact that less than 5% of all connections are less than 256kbs and you've got a faster platform to build on.
Cheaper -- It's no surprise that almost every part of the Internet felt price pressure in 2009. What was surprising was the fact that it was so widespread. Base connection costs dropped, hosting costs dropped, and even development costs dropped (based on a review of IT spending and per man-hour charges) Some of this can be attributed to the competitive market, but some can also be credited to the economies of scale that are coming about as more advanced cloud services (applications, storage, and raw computing) come online.
Smarter -- An interesting fact was revealed by Google researchers this summer; people are getting better at search. There's a marked increase in the use of complex search terms and basic query tricks, such as placing words in quotes to find exact matches. In addition, 2009 saw a 13% increase in the use of referral and shopping engines by consumers, willing to do the extra legwork to leverage comparison shopping engines.
These three factors help set the platform for rapid internet growth in 2009. Internet traffic jumped a surprising 21% in 2009 (according to Online Publishers Association's unique visitor statistics), with the biggest % increase in growth coming from social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc). Many people have read the press and assumed social networking is the only real growth online. Quite the contrary.
Organizations definitely need to understand this social growth. However, it's critical for them to understand that this is the smallest group of users online (17%). Content users -- people that are online to find information (including product and technical information) make up 22% of users online. Commerce users -- those actually buying make up 20%. The rest are using email, instant messaging, and search engines.
You can be certain that Internet activity will continue to grow in 2010. The combination of better speed, lower cost, and a user population more open to new applications is a great combination. Some specific trends we see:
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