Web Video | The Numbers Make Sense Part Two * edited

The big change to wrap your mind around is that as internet access change, internet content changes. When content changes, so do traffic patterns.

If you can get decent traffic to something, the potential to monetize that traffic increases with the amount of either raw traffic or targeted traffic (ie. one million casual visitors a month to a site that has ads paying $3 CPM is valuable real estate, as is a site that generates a month 5000 hyper-targeted visitors to a $100 product).

Therefore, as traffic patterns change, so does the potential to earn money from action taking visitors.

Let’s look at it historically…

When the World Wide Web came along, and you could get on America Online at 28.8 dial-up connections a few years later, more people thought of using the Internet to communicate or socialize as desireable.

Then we got to 56K dial-up speeds, and the computer came a lot closer to becoming a household appliance. If you met an American and they didn’t know what the Internet was, or email was, you’d think you were talking to someone from another century.

You get the idea – as the speed we can access the internet increases, the type of content we’re conditioned to want and expect increases.

So let’s skip to now.

In the past year and a half, the availability of high-speed access rose at the same time that the price of access fell. One may have caused the other, but i’m not going to try to get that deep now or we’ll be here forever.

To continue, everyone, technically, who has the cash, can have broadband.

If you’re willing to pay for it, there are few places in the US that broadband isn’t available, and if you can get a telephone, you can get at least a 56K connection, nine times out of ten.

Even right now, I’m writing this post on the go, connected to the Internet by a Cingular Wireless Internet card. (Aside: I hear Sprint is the fastest, but I am already a Cingular customer. I wonder what that means about me as a consumer….)

If the current growth rate continues, 50% of ALL Adult Americans will have broadband access. At home.

That’s right. The total pool of eyes on the Web will be half of Adult America. Think of how many newcomers to internet marketing that is at the start of the year, right after Christmas when everyone gets their new laptops, prices that are also falling.

How will you get in that pool?

Well, next, let’s think about who the “late comers” to the Net will be this coming year.