Two Percent And Growing Fast

In my book, Net Attitude, I said we were 2% of the way into what the Internet has in store for our business and personal lives. In current speeches I have been saying 5%. There are various metrics one could look at to get an idea of the Internet's penetration. The WordPOPClock projection is that the world's population on March 1 will be 6.35 billion. The world's Internet users at any point in time is somewhere around 5% of that number. More important than the numbers are the things you can and can't yet do using the Internet. I believe that 95% of the desirable things that could be done on the Internet are not yet being done.

One of those things is purchasing of goods and services. It is getting easier every day but we have a long way to go. For 2003, online retail spending, excluding travel and auctions, grew 22% over 2002 to $52 billion. Including travel, the total was $93 billion, up 27% over 2002. These are impressive numbers and I expect we will continue to see double digit growth for quite some time. However, let's put it in perspective with the "offline" world. Walmart just announced their sales for the last quarter -- $74.9 billion. That equates to $832.2 million per day or $34.7million per hour. In two days, Walmart (one company) sales exceeded the sales of all companies online for 2003. (read more)

e-Business February 22, 2004 01:15 PM