Each year, venerable venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins, releases a slide deck which has become the “State of the Union” for the Internet. Of the 294 slides, a number immediately caught my attention as they directly impact domain traffic monetisation.
There are over 3.6B Internet users in the world which represents 49% of the world’s population. The growth in the number of new Internet users getting online is slowing from 12% in 2016 to 7% in 2017. Eventually, you would expect the rate of growth to asymptote at the rate of population growth globally.
What this shows is the Internet is the single largest marketplace in the world and more than that....it's accessible by everyone. Natural type-in domain traffic should continue to increase at similar rates to the overall growth rate. User sophistication and technological innovations will and has impacted this rate of growth. The challenge as always been how to best remove the junk traffic from the real traffic.....more on this in a future article.
Internet advertising spend for 2017 in the USA continued to move upwards by 21% to a peak of $88B. Since the growth in the number of online users in the USA is almost flat the value per user from an advertiser’s perspective is continuing to increase. This will place an upward pressure on EPC rates and make domains with traffic that much more valuable.
