The Power of the Internet
Since it’s inception in 1990 the World Wide Web, or internet, has created endless amounts of opportunities for individuals to showcase their talent to masses of people, and helped them create enterprises of incredible scale by being able to reach millions of people around the world.
Prime example is Amazon (pun not intended), Jeff Bezos quit his $300,000 a year job on Wall Street and founded Amazon in 1994, initially as an online bookstore. Since then Amazon has expanded its products & services to include video and audio streaming, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Making Jeff the richest man in the world, even after his wife divorced him and he had to give her half his money. Mental!But as I said previously, the internet has helped people showcase their personalities and talent to masses of people, and the biggest platform that has helped to do that is YouTube.
Originally created as a video sharing platform by some former founders of PayPal in February 2005, it was then bought by Google for $1.65 billion in November 2006. Not a bad return after 1 year and 8 months!
YouTube has helped thousands of people create success for themselves that many entrepreneurs dream of having, most of which have created a celebrity persona and have become incredibly well known to Millennials and Gen Z. In fact, a recent survey found that 75% of Children aged from 6 to 17 want to become YouTubers as a career path. When I was that age, I wanted to become a professional footballer, but obviously a “severe knee injury” *cough cough*, hampered my chances.
To demonstrate this point further you may have heard of a boxing event that happened in November, which at the time of writing this article is the highest-selling UK pay-per-view fight of the year.
British YouTuber KSI faced American YouTuber Logan Paul in a professional boxing match, with both fighters being promoted by the biggest boxing promoter in this day and age, Eddie Hearn.
The fight took place at the Staples Centre Arena in Los Angeles, with both the WBO World Super-Middleweight Championship and WBC World Lightweight Championship being fought for on the undercard. KSI won the fight on points and Eddie Hearn later revealed that the fight sold more pay-per-views on DAZN than Anthony Joshua’s shock defeat to Andy Ruiz earlier in the year! (for those that don’t know what DAZN is, it’s pretty much Netflix for boxing and other sports) Boxing promoters are becoming increasingly concerned with the sports ageing audience. As most young people prefer watching UFC due to the fast-paced action and brutality, boxing promoters are trying to find ways of attracting young people to the sport.
This event has helped but it has also come under an incredible amount of scrutiny by former professional boxers and hardcore fans, calling the fight a ‘disgrace’ and ‘disrespectful’. Despite the fight selling more pay-per-views this year than Anthony Joshua’s fight with Andy Ruiz Jr, and Joshua is arguably the biggest professional boxer in the world right now.
Even though I don’t expect you to go on and become professional boxers after reading this, if you are a small or medium sized company looking to grow, then understanding how powerful the internet is and how connected the world is will help you achieve your goals. By using the internet to it's full extent you can scale your business to unimaginable levels. But, the sad truth is that most companies out their aren’t using the internet and social media enough to reach their audience. It presents all of us with so many opportunities, the possibilities really are endless!