The new size of the internet

Repost from 2012. In 2015, there are 3.2 billion internet users.

In 1999, there were almost 250 million internet users. In 2012 there are almost 2.3 billion internet users. What does it mean that the internet is more populated?

This is going from a parish of nearly self-sufficient farmers to a city of specialists. It means we can have cobblers, blacksmiths and pin-makers.

We can have extremely successful businesses that don’t ever intend to reach every internet user.

We can create entirely new classes of businesses.

This is much harder to grasp than it seems at first, because the scale of the internet is so different from the “real” world. The internet is the densest city you’ve ever set foot in.

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