By enabling publishers in many of these foreign countries to have Google Adsense on their pages Google will be dramatically expanding their advertising inventory space. Some of these regions have huge numbers of relatively untapped Internet users. For example Asia has 512 million Internet users as compared to North America's 243 million. In terms of domain names this is the place to be!

Local online advertisers in many of these countries have begun the cycle of pouring money into Google Adwords. As we have discussed before in the initial stages of the keyword auction process the system automatically works on behalf of the advertiser. Keyword prices haven't maxed out as yet as the system is in its infantile stages of growth.

The challenge for Google is to quickly drive the advertising expenditure upwards in regions that are awash with traffic but are still in a largely cash based economy. The penetration of credit cards is often a precursor to greater amounts of advertising spent online. The reason for this is that advertisers can see a direct link between dollars spent and sales. Without an online method of payment this is almost impossible resulting in online advertising becoming almost a leap of faith.

Even though the revenue per click is still relatively low in these countries the volumes of clicks are enormous. In addition, publishers that are using Google Adsense are paid commensurately lower for their traffic and due to the lower GDP per capita in many of the countries they are still able to be profitable. Google's challenge will be to successfully orchestrate the balancing act between publishers and advertisers. This will likely be accomplished via cross subsidising these emerging online economies from more established Internet markets.



The growth rate and potential growth in numbers of new Internet users in some of these emerging online behemoths is staggering. The Middle East and Africa has grown by over 900% since 2000 and Latin America by over 600%. In the same time period Asia has grown by 348% and still has 3.3 billion potential users that can come online. This dwarfs Africa by over 3.3 times! These areas are the future of the Internet and Google isn't absent in these markets.

So what does all of this information mean for the domain name industry? What I hope to do in the next article is wrap up some of these points for the benefit of parking companies and eventually domain owners. I hope that it also provokes some discussion around how to out Google, Google.

Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmour -- Reprinted with permission -- May 18, 2008