What Businesses Are Succeeding on the Net?

After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially, a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet. Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful place. In breakthroughs that show the promise of ecommerce wasn't all smoke and mirrors, many dot-coms including eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc., E-Trade Group Inc., Google Inc. and others have successfully re-defined the landscape of Wall Street.

There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay for valuable content along with quality products and services offered online. Hundreds of paid content and product-oriented websites have already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer values her time and is willing to pay for access to quality information and the convenience of purchasing products and services online.

However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some  products may be better suited for online sales than others; others simply will not work online. According to an Ernst and Young study, the most popular online purchases are computer related products (40%), books (20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music (6%), subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%).

Businesses offering paid services have also prospered enormously. The top three categories (Business Content/Investment, Entertainment/Lifestyles and Personals/Dating) consistently account for 62% of all paid content revenue. One statistic indicates that 85% of all money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to the top 50 sites in most categories.

In terms of “stickiness” of different categories, Business sites - especially finance and investment rank the highest. In other words, users are more likely to spend more time surfing through a business website compared to other categories as illustrated below.

 Source: Nielsen/NetRatings- 60 -

According to the above figures a person spends about 22 minutes on a finance website on average.

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