Is the Online Business Market Saturated?

Before you take up any business venture, it's a good idea to assess the market for both your products and your opportunity. To that end, some people must be asking themselves whether the "internet business boom" is over. Is the bubble about to burst? Is online business going to repeat the "dot com" fiasco of a few years ago?

Personally, I don't think so. In fact, I think it is years away from maturity. Serious researchers tell us that the size of the internet continues to grow at a phenomenal pace, doubling every 18 months or so. Similarly, e-commerce, or business done on the internet, continues to expand at a rapid pace.

Estimates are that the total number of people online should be nearing one billion by the year 2005. The US Department of Commerce reports that business done online in the past year or two occurs at a rate of about $20 Billion per year, and that number is expected to rise to $3 Trillion within the next few years. That doesn't sound like market saturation to me ...

Granted the market for "make money online" products (i.e., "how to" books on making money) is crowded, and dominated by a few really big players, but there are hundreds, probably thousands, of smaller "niche" markets waiting to be filled, and the number of people becoming interested in having a home-based internet business continues to expand.

More to the point, is the Network Marketing niche saturated? First, ask yourself how many people you know that are doing network marketing. Personally, I only know of perhaps half a dozen. Of those, none, as far as I know, are doing it online. When I've pointed out to them the power of the internet as a marketing medium, most expressed surprise at the idea. In spite of their dedication to "offline" network marketing, none of these people had seriously considered doing it online. Maybe they just don't know how.

Granted, it was a lot easier (though considerably more expensive) to start an online business five years ago and make a good income, but that doesn't mean that the idea is dead. It just takes a little more creativity than it used to.

One way to assess whether the market is saturated is to look at the success or failure of some of the "leads brokers" on the internet. These are companies whose entire business depends upon their ability to continue to find fresh new prospects and opportunity seekers. I've signed up for several such services, and in each case, they were able to deliver my leads package in a matter of days, to at most a few weeks. If there were nobody left out there who was interested in online business opportunities, these lead brokers would be out of business, or it would take months for them to deliver their product.

Another way to assess the market is to look at the numbers of people searching for information on how to start an internet business. Recently, I plugged the term "internet business" into the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, and tallied the number of searches for that and related terms that had something to do with starting an online business. The result? Over 42,000 searches per month spread across about a dozen relevant search terms. Granted, some of those could be duplicates, wherein people refined and redid their search, but over 40,000 searches per month tells me that the market is brimming with new opportunity seekers.

I think reports of the death of online business are greatly exaggerated ...