The Real End of the WWWild West

You’re on the internet.

…along with some portion of the 2 billion other people who connect each day.

Every day, more people connect. And every day, more people spend more time online.

Which is why there is always room for a substantial number of new entrants who can be successful, and this doesn’t always hurt existing companies because there are more people to pick up what you’re laying down. We’re all eating bigger pieces from an ever-expanding pie.

To illustrate, let’s use journalism as an example.

There are more journalists now than there were in 1985 (someone probably has a chart with this data). But that’s fine if you’re a journalist from a competitive standpoint, because there are more readers doing more reading than ever before, so perhaps a somewhat equivalent proportion of journalists can find an audience as before.

And that’s why you’re not late.

Yet. And not for a while.

But that doesn’t mean you never will be. It just means you’re extremely lucky to be of sound mind and ability in this era.

Eventually that will change.

And that change will bring with it the end of the days of the ol’ west on the net, or, as I like to call it, the end of the WWWild West.

Now, hold your horses: didn’t the old west end on the internet when it pretty much became impossible to be anonymous online?

That’s one version of it, and the end of internet anonymity was certainly the end of an interesting and fun era in the technology.

But there’s a much more substantial shift around the corner…

For a moment, though, I digress.

Consider the early days of the frontier times in the States. Lots of previously undeveloped (from the emerging American perspective) land was available to settlers and the entrepreneurs of the day (of course I’m aware of what it took to make that land ‘available’. My intention is to describe resource utilization from an economic perspective).

But at a certain point all of the best, new land was owned and the situation no longer existed where you simply staked your sign post 20 meters aft of the adjacent business to setup shop. To procure space to operate, you (or some other force, say, another’s bankruptcy) had to displace some other business.

Suddenly, there was increasing economic sophistication and an ever increasing state of competition. Forevermore, to compete in business, you would have to have mastery over an increasingly complex set of skills.

Now, what does this have to do with the end of the WWWild West? Everything.

Coming full circle — right now you’re on the internet. And soon, 5 billion more people are going to be joining you.

And when that 5 billionth person connects, when every last human who wants to be online is online, everything changes.

Here’s why:

Each day on earth, there are 7 billion x 24 possible man-hours on the planet. Some number is the average amount of hours that people across the planet will spend online each day. Some will use it more, some less, but there will be a planetary average. Let’s call the average 6 hours.

So, there will be 7 billion x 6 hours internet-man-hours available every single day once the other 5 billion join us.

Once every person is connected and is using the internet at their own individual eventual average, we’re not all competing for a seemingly infinitely expanding resource (people’s attention), we’re competing for an extremely finite resource, namely 42,000,000,000 internet man-hours a day.

After these 42 billion IMHs are in use each day, the competition is going to get stiff, and the practiced will have a nearly insurmountable advantage. At this point, if you have not started your internet-based business — you are too late.