Aardvark Daily

The world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.

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I see no recession, only opportunity

30 January 2009

Quite frankly, I'm sick and tired of economists and economic commentators telling me how dire the situation is and how much worse it's going to get.

Unemployment tipped to break eight percent, 50 million out of work world-wide, record levels of business failures and mortgage foreclosures, etc, etc.

In the face of all this bad news I expect we can also count on a significant increase in the suicide rate as well.

Well I say "enough".

There were two items of good news that I simply have to bring to readers' attention today.

If we can bring these two good-news stories together then the future might be brighter than ever, at least for the residents of GodZone.

The first, and most important of these good-news stories is a report that suggests there are now more than a billion people who are connected to the internet -- a full 15% of the world's total population.

That is simply fantastic news!

The other ray of sunshine is that the NZ government (like governments of most developed countries) is looking to pour a snotload of money into the local economy in an attempt to ward-off the worst effects of the recession.

Now let's stop and look at these two stories for a moment...

On the one hand we have a billion people who are all rich enough to afford an internet connection and on the other we (at last) have a government who's prepared to spend money to make money.

In between, we have four million Kiwis, a greater than average number of who (we like to tell ourselves) are smart, educated, innovative and entrepreneurial.

Sounds like a recipe for success to me.

We only have to look at how a bunch of dumbarsed spammers can make a king's ransom by pitching worthless products to a massive market in order to see just what potential there really is in this situation.

A "spam-out" might reach a million people and just a thousand of those people might be stupid or desperate enough to buy whatever snake-oil is being pitched. If each sale is worth (say) US$39.95 -- that's sales of NZ$77,000.

Now imagine you have a product or service that's really worth buying and you are able to reach just one percent of the billion or so people on the Net (without spamming). If you make US$10 per sale and just one percent of that one percent buy your product or service, you'll be pocketing almost two million kiwi dollars.

Remember the guy who sold pixels for a dollar each? It's the same concept, albeit not reliant on that crazy novelty aspect to work.

Now you'd think that a bunch of uber-smart Kiwis, backed by a little taxpayer funds would be able to sell something worth US$10 to one in every 10,000 internet users don't you?

But hang on, if it was that easy, we'd all be rich already -- right?

Of course. The reason we don't have a whole bunch of Kiwi millionaires who've made their fortune flogging stuff on the web is because we're not organised and most of us don't have a clue how to go about doing this.

That's where the government ought to be stepping in.

If the government is serious about injecting cash into the local economy then I strongly believe they ought to set up an internet-marketing advisory body whose job it is to help all those would-be millionaires that want to pitch a product to the billion Net-users.

What we need is some basic infrastructure, lots of useful, relevant, educational material regarding online marketing/sales, and a streamlined system for getting Kiwi entrepreneurs connected to that market of a billion consumers.

Naturally it would be stupid to believe that everyone who tries their hand at pitching wares to the online audience of a billion folks will succeed -- but it only takes a thousand Kiwis to make their million bucks and we've injected a billion dollars into the local economy. More importantly, that money will have been largely generated by exports so it will be *new* money that helps offset our trade deficit and reduce the amount we have to borrow from overseas sources.

I'm picking that it would take no more than one to two million dollars of taxpayers funds to set up an uber-effective resource to turn keen-as-beans Kiwi entrepreneurs into cyber-savvy online marketers.

That is an investment with a huge payback for the taxpayer and the wealth of the nation.

It sure beats the lame millions we've spent trying to entice ex-pat Kiwis to come home, especially now that they'd probably be returning to spend a stint on the dole anyway.

What do readers think?

Is it time to create such a resource from the taxpayer's wallet as a method of helping Kiwis tap into the single largest market on the face of the planet?

When you look back at the farcical schemes previous governments have wasted taxpayers' money on, would this not be a much better idea than most of them?

Worth a crack Nigel?

Perhaps someone might like to suggest this to Campbell Live who are soliciting suggestions as to what the government might spend its money on in order to patch up our ailing economy.

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