According to a banner add for Yahoo Domains, it said that “75% of the world’s population will have their own domain name by 2003.” That sounds abusrd to me, is there any way that that could be true?
Personally, I come from a middle class suburb, and I don’t think even 75% of my neighbors will have their own domain names in 2 years. In fact, I’d doubt that even 50% of my neighbors would have their own domain names. So how the hell will 75% of the world’s population, including all those in under developed or technology lacking countries, have their own domains? Am I missing something, or does this ad make no sense? Is there any possible way that this stat will be anywhere near true?
That’s ridiculous. Are you sure you didn’t misread something? Is Yahoo drunk?
Or maybe they mean, “by 2003, we’ll have registered 75% of the last names in the world, and be bugging anybody we can find with that name to buy it from us.”
They might possibly mean that there’ll be 4.5 billion registered domain names by 2003, which is enough for one each for 75% of the population. Of course, most domain names are owned by a small handfull of people.
With nearly 50 per cent of the world’s population never to have made a telephone call, this is obviously rubbish. Maybe they extrapolated the trend of a short timespan with extreme domain name registrations and calculated what will happen if that trend goes on. But every trend stops sooner or later.
There was a pyrimid scam that was going on in my area about 8-9 months ago selling a domain name/web page opportunity for about $500.
It amazed me how many people actually bought into this. I tried to talk a couple of my friends out of it, but they still bought into it. None of them actually had anything to put on a web page, or any way to actually advertise, or anything to sell for that matter. They were convinced that because they were involved in the “internet”, they were going to get rich.
2 people I know who bought one do not even own computers.
So, perhaps, even those people in remotest Africa who do not have telephones will have a domain name if they meet the right marketer and go to a conference at the local Holiday Inn.
I own 4 domain names. One of my sisters owns one. But that’s it for our extended family. My other sister and her family are all computer geeks and professionals. Have been into computers since the late '70s. But they don’t care to get a domain. Not everyone needs one. (Don’t ask me why I need four. I’m just a geek, OK?)
Where I currently live, a lot of the people I associate with do not even own computers. I think it’ll be a major accomplishment for many of them to have finally taken the plunge and gotten a computer by '03. Hell, most of the people I know with computers still are only doing the rudimentary email/internet thing. Some of them are pretty helpless with even that.
LisaRX: Yes, I know some people who were interested in such a scheme. I was just aghast - it was too much money, and I really didn’t see what they’d get that they couldn’t get for free (a free site with GeoCities, etc.) I don’t think my friends ever did buy it, though.
