Little bit jealous of Indians...

[ausername]

Well, and people from other fast developing nations, like Indonesia and China.

They are basically 15 years behind us in terms of the evolution of their internet aren't they.

So over the past couple of years they've been in 'gold rush' stage, still being able to handreg good local domains or buy them cheap / speculate on future demand, and all sorts of sites which have become unfeasible for Western webmasters in a crowded marketplace dominated by big players are still open to them.

E.g. Thousands of Indians making a living from wallpaper sites, lyrics sites, forums, all sorts of stuff that would work for us 10 years ago (income relative of course, but then so is ad economy). They don't have huge 20 year old competitors in their niches, they are all fighting to become one of those huge competitors in 10 years.

I was looking for wallpaper scripts the other day, for a little website I'm going to build (for fun, not money, before anybody starts with the standard lines).... struggled to find anything decent, until I got down to pages 5, 6, 7 and found sh*t loads of good Indonesian themes, selling for about $5 in their own currency because that's what their markets bare. Their sites were written in Indonesian, they weren't even trying to sell the themes to the English speaking world.

Previously they'd all be chasing tier 1 money, trying to win clicks from the English speaking world or selling services to US or UK businesses.... now they all have fast growing domestic ecosystems.

Envious to be honest of all of them!

Don't misinterpret this post by the way, I don't mean 10 or 15 years behind in skill or technology (hell, Bangalore has more of a tech scene than we do and that's where Silicon Valley recruits to plug their skill gaps), but I just mean in terms of having a massively fast growing market / user base as more and more people get online.... akin perhaps to the time that the masses could get broadband instead of dialup in the UK.... and so much left to build to cater for it, and still so much to play for if you know what I mean.

Oh and I got a £2.45 adsense click from India the other day, WTF.... doubt I got anymore than 10p when I was last having a serious go at this CPC grind. Doesn't beat the $4 click somebody on another forum got from Ethiopia recently though

Anybody who think the internet has gone stale, or lost its excitement, or has reached peak, or domaining is flatlining, etc etc.... they are wrong, its just not happening in our world! People elsewhere right now experiencing what you did in your halycon days, makes me all nostalgic and sad

 

[Pierre Barnard]

I agree with you. I am seeing it here in South Africa. I am regging good names, decent one word names and 3L's. Problem is, I would probably have to keep renewing them for another 10 years before the rest of the population wake up to the value of digital assets, in particular domain names.

 

[ausername]

Just keep the very best ones then, build a portfolio of 15, 20, 25 domains which may change your life one day, if the renewals on a larger portfolio will cause you hardship.

 

[JMI]

I guess there is the device and connectivity issues to consider.. iphone v1.. 2G etc

 

[ausername]

Smartphones are getting much cheaper, can get quad core HD smartphone running Android 6.0 for about £30.

A mate of mine purchased a phone from China which has the exact same specs as the Samsung S7 for £65 recently, beautiful screen.

Check out Gearbest DOT com, as an example.

The brand HUAWEI is the 3rd best selling mobile phone brand on the planet.... and priced for the Chinese market!

4G Huawei phone for £82, but that is China's premium brand: https://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_650156.html?wid=4

Alternative 4G phone with 13mp camera here for £42: https://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_476958.html?wid=122

Father in law bought a Huawei and loves it, I might give them a go.

 

[ausername]

Oh and Gearbest is a decent example of what I was saying in my OP really..... Alexa Rank 224.... Chinese site, which is particularly big in Brazil (Alexa 31).

Amazon.com has no presence in Brazil just yet.

So good example of it all being 'to play for' in the fast developing nations.

 

[Pierre Barnard]

I guess there is the device and connectivity issues to consider.. iphone v1.. 2G etc

HAHA, what is iphone?

 

[Admin]

I really do like your posts. However, my opinion is very different on this subject. I don't envy indians at all, on the contrary. I think you and I were born having won the lottery of birth in the UK. The UK's a developed nation with more companies than you could ever need (as a market). Nobody from another country is able or will be able to sell to them as well as a native brit can. Your language, professionalism and cultural background matter when convincing people to give you business.

I spend a portion of my life dealing with the spam and nuisance of indians and it makes me sad. I have tried countless times to work with indians on different projects from small to large. Each time (after failure with the individual) I try with renewed hope and try to have unbiased optimism that this next time it will work and that this person wont just keep looking for the next client, they will actually care about the quality of the work they do for the client they have. And that is the problem, without exception, it has never happened. I have now given up. It's not racism, its cultural and its my experience.

 

[ausername]

Ah, yeah good point man.

I really just meant in a web dev / domaining context.

We are also fortunate to have been born in the UK for reasons other than the developed markets and being blessed by being native speakers of the global business language.... and that's weather and climate + the complete absence of any significant risk of natural disasters, those are becoming an increasing problem in numerous places including the USA. Won't ever hear me moan about grey skies, beats monsoons, hurricanes, tsunami's and earthquakes.

The biggest threat to the UK in that regard is a possible rise in sea levels, but we've got friendly neighbours over in Holland who can teach us how to live with that

 

[Edwin]

Actually, if the jet stream shifts significantly because of climate change, it could get mighty mighty chilly around here.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/climate-change-cold-winters-uk-us-weather-study-1.657530

Plus since the UK's not had to deal with many natural disasters, it's super-rubbish at doing so when something out of the ordinary comes along. For instance, it's not unknown to have 250mm of rain an hour (that's not a typo) in Japan - yes, that causes local flooding, but the sewers in big cities like Tokyo are engineered on a gigantic scale, and it's all pretty dry very very quickly.
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/christoffer-rudquist-tokyo-drainage-system/ (the first photo in the slideshow is amazingly like the Mines of Moria in the LOTR films)

Whereas a fraction of that 250mm in a 24-hour period would see raw sewage floating down the middle of any UK cities, for sure.

 

[ausername]

A little known fun fact.... In 2004 Google built a failed social network called Orkut, around the time when Friendster, Bebo and others were fighting Myspace for a slice of the social networking amrket... before they all got obliterated by Facebook.

Most of you have probably never heard of it... but Orkut thrived.... in Brazil.... where it was the number 1 social network for many years. Google moved the Orkut servers to Brazil and built a little HQ in a small Brazilian town, when established 53% of its traffic was Brazilian, only 3.3% American. Eventually shuttered in 2014 (I guess facebook eventually won over).

Stuff like this just fascinates me tough, how the internet that we know can be so different to the internet that another knows, and also how you can build a product in one country and become a completely unintentional success in another. Its crazy to think that many more Brazilian layman will know about Orkut than will know of Amazon.com (obviously not anybody involved in tech, or working on the stock exchange, but most other people).

That's why I said what I did about being jealous of Indians and Indonesians, just meant in the context of their growth cycle online.... I missed ours because I'm only 32. Obviously I don't envy the whole package, e.g. you then have to include the pooing into a hole and wiping your bum with your bare hand thing.

 

[Admin]

I wonder why Orkut failed...... no I don't, they called it Orkut ...wtf lol

 

[Edwin]

Ah, Orkut. There's a blast from the past. There was a brief, oh-so-brief moment when it was actually a player outside of Brazil. But probably no more than a matter of weeks or a few months.

The same happens in many countries. You've probably never heard of Yandex (Russia's largest search engine), Line (Whatsapp-like social network that's huge in Japan), Baidu (China's largest search engine), Weibo (China's answer to Twitter), Alipay (massive payment service in China, like Paypal), Naver (massive portal in South Korea), Kakaku.com (price comparison engine in Japan that's like PriceSpy and Kelkoo and Idealo all rolled into one) etc.

It's only in the English-speaking world that eBay/Amazon/Facebook/Twitter/Google/Paypal dominate. Most everywhere else can boast home-grown solutions that outdo the foreign upstarts. In some cases, the brands we're familiar with don't even get a look in - for instance, eBay gave up on the Japanese market when Yahoo Auctions (I know, Yahoo, right?) took about 99% of the market. And now Yahoo Auctions is getting pummelled by Merkari, another site you won't have heard of.

 

[Edwin]

BTW, not sure if it still goes on (I expect it does, but I've not been following too closely recently) but for years and years there was a trend of entrepreneurs in Japan, China etc. going "What's big in the USA?" and then rolling their own version for the local market and winning major market share long before the US company that was being copied/cloned/borrowed from even really thought about that market.

 

[ausername]

I have actually heard of Yandex, but only because a forum of mine had a bot problem which was adding a lot of server load and I had to end up blocking Yandex IP's from access because it was sending like 10 bots at a time to crawl my site.

Wrote an article with the title www.Baidu.com on a content farm in 2010 and got 2000 hits a day!

I use Alipay at least once a week, because its integrated with Aliexpress now (where I buy 90% of my stock for my ebay business). Only one I've not heard of is Naver.

China and Russia are protectionist countries though, make it very difficult for American companies to operate in their domestic markets and that's why Baidu and Yandex etc have been able to thrive.

There was also this weird quirk in China where search engines would give away free MP3's every day to searchers, and Google had to license a load of music to give away to try and attract users..... nobody would use them until they offered out the free music, weird!

Twitter is hugely popular in Japan by the way, when twitter surprises everybody by reporting active user growth each quarter (when it feels to English speakers like the platform is dying) it is largely fueled by their growth in Japan.

Another interesting thing I read a while back was that 4chan was purchased by the owner of the Japanese equivalent, which is one of the biggest sites in Japan (and actually inspired the creation of 4chan). So its not like American have got all the original ideas and the rest of the world copies them, the west has copied a bit from them too.

 

[Edwin]

Yeah, Twitter's huge in Japan. Partly down to the fact that Japanese is a much more efficient language (i.e. it takes much, much fewer characters to say the same thing) so even at 140 characters you could practically write an essay in Japanese. So much so that Twitter has (for the moment at least) not doubled the character count for Japanese-language posts. They're already "long enough" for most people, whereas English-language users were screaming out for more space to write fully-formed thoughts and proper sentences.

 

[JMI]

@Admin is correct about working with India and cultural differences in business. A long while back I lost thousands with a company called GoIGI. I say to anyone considering outsourcing to india be very careful. The deal is you initially deal with a front man who is very articulate and knowledgeable on a technical perspective (solution architect type level) and puts all your development and project management fears at rest. Then after about 2 weeks (if your lucky) you'll be binned off to some script kiddie who speaks little English, probably paid $1 dollar per hour from a shack, using a hacked up WP theme and code canyon mashup to create your dream 'bespoke' solution - instead of the slick development team shown on the company site. After a while you'll end up completely running the project to try and salvage something and get it over the line to at least something vaguely usable. Unfortunately the final deliverable won't work or look like what you specifically asked for, but a funny old thing is that after a chat with the 'front man' it can be all rectified with a little more $$$$$!

 

[Skinner]

Similar experience with Indian Devs, what I have found though is having them build custom scripts isn't too bad. Often the functionality is there, but the code is dismal and lacks comments but it can be tidied up if you have basic understanding of the language they have wrote in.

One thing which is consistently used is short cuts like <?="echo this";> and other such, almost like they are all the same person.

I've also had some shocking var names like $1, $2, $3 or var1, var2, etc, all totally generic names.

I also learned that payment isn't made until its working on my server environment, often they build on local machines so you run the code on your own server and it is a wreck.

 

[ausername]

I think I may need to clarify what I was talking about, because people seem to be talking now about the quality of Indian contractors and outsourcing.

I've never hired an Indian firm for anything, and wouldn't.... I'd hire British firms, because they are easy to sue or chargeback.

And literally three days ago I thanked an American hosting firm for using native English speaking support staff even at unsociable hours (for their time zone), and a few weeks back I finally snapped at one of those f*cking spam phone calls you get when you forget to register privacy on a domain, the ones which come from a London or Dublin number so you feel compelled to answer 'just in case' and then you get some screeching foreign woman on the phone "heeelloooooo, I call from Googlezon". F*ck the f*ck off!

I'm talking about the excitement of entrepreneurs operating in a market which is constantly growing, tens of thousands of new customers getting online every week, hundreds of thousands more upgrading devices and connection speeds etc. Fighting for market share which won't exist until next week, or next month, or next year. A pie which is getting bigger. Contrasted to our markets where penetration is at something like 97% so will only grow as fast as the population.

I was contrasting their situation now with the dot com boom in Silicon Valley, circa mid to late nineties, then the period just after it when those still standing mopped up. That's what it must feel like to have been living in Bangalore or Shanghai for the past few years, and for the next.... with people job hopping for an extra $xxxxx and collecting stock options, hoping that their startup is the next to be hoovered up by a giant looking for a share in their new market etc.

What they have playing out is a situation whereas their actions now determine whether they get a wikipedia entry for the rest of their life for starting India's first 'this' or 'that'.

That's what I'm talking about really, the gold rush.... not the various spivs and chancers who install free wordpress themes and call themselves developers, or ask you to transfer 50% up front by Western Union, or ask if you have a Payoneer account because they are banned from Paypal.

Did hire a Filipino virtual assistant once for data entry and finding information on google.... until she suddenly ghosted me, I think somebody offered her more money or something.

 

[Edwin]

You captured the white hot excitement very eloquently for somebody who did not participate in it directly. Brought back a lot of memories, having done the “.com startup” thing from 1998-2001. There was a genuine sense of being able to change the world, and a feeling of untold riches around the corner.

But what goes up must come down, and that’s true of expectations as well. When things fail, it’s like hitting a brick wall on a motorway - a huge gut punch.

The early web in general was like you describe too, with Lycos and Infoseek and Excite and other lost names all gameable in different ways, and Yahoo not much more than a simple web directory.

Then came Google to tilt the playing field, and ending up distorting it like a black hole. But then Adsense came along, and suddenly (literally overnight) if you had a site with decent traffic, you were coining it. (Ironically, Adsense would have saved our startup too but it came 2 years too late - it was the ad sales side that killed it, not the traffic side)

Whereas now the web is dull and corporate, and even apps and mobile seem to have finished the bulk of their growth spurt.