Financial crisis and the web

2008 seems to be the financial crisis’s year. People with the fear of loosing money, they withdraw their savings from the banks, creating even bigger problems for the already unstable economy. The federal government even though tries to help, the effect is late from the party.

Brokers on the Wall Street loosing everything they have, sit in front of their PCs thinking about “What now” and what could they do to end the recession.

Just as everyone, spammers and phishers are also affected by the global financial crisis. More and more spam and phishing message is traveling on the global net, seemingly seeking people who they can fool with their blatant messages and steal their identity, personal data and money. What they earn is clearly money: personal data can be sold, identity can be used to access financial services and so on.

The other day I found through an over-digged article on ReadWriteWeb which tries to predict what will 2008 bring for us, obviously the article was published in 2007.

The most mind blowing prediction for me is that 2008 will start with a recession or fear of recession. Interesting, that this became true, probably too true. After in the Q2 of 2008 CitiBank almost crashed the NASDAQ, other mammoth banks and insurance companies also entered in crisis.

But how all these affect the web?

E-Commerce & Auctions

The mammoth e-commerce and auction websites like Amazon, Walmart and E-Bay are suffering the most by the economical recession.
The buyer mass slowly started to re-think their life, they spend less offline, they spend less online. This creates enormous issues for the e-commerce mammoths as they can’t exist without paying clients.
Trends shows that all these websites are in recession since the beginning of this year, can this recession be changed? I can hardly believe.

Advertising

Seemingly the advertising networks are the only which earns with the global financial crisis. Advertisers in the hope they will have more clients they spend more on online advertising. CPM and CPC ads still brings nice revenues for the publishers, or even better revenues than in 2007. This means that advertisers are using the advertising networks just like before the worldwide recession, or even more.
CPA ads were never the favorite of the publishers. If the CPAs didn’t get the attention of the publishers before the economical recession, this made the CPAs even less popular. Since there is less buying power there’s less people who actually make conversions for the advertisers, and CPAs only pay if conversion was made.
Trends show that the two most popular online advertising solutions, AdWords and the former Overture, Yahoo! Search Marketing, has increased traffic since the beginning of the global financial recession. Just a coincidence or it’s something more?

Overall Net Traffic

People got even less social in 2008. After Twitter’s 2007 success, there was a small recession in its popularity, MySpace continued its continuous recession, Digg lost at least 5% of its traffic.
Surprisingly, it seems all the users which are absent from the above giants moved to Facebook. I never thought Facebook, a service created by a guy just like You can increase even more its userbase and traffic.
Although many trustworthy editor and net-guru predicted that Facebook will crash under its own weight, this service is more popular than ever, and its traffic is increasing with a 17% rate. Monthly!
It was also predicted that Google will have issues in 2008. People will protest against its expansion policy, many said some new competitor will show up and ruin Google’s fame, and so on. None of these happened so far. At least not in this context. Google was and many thought will be the number 1 search engine forever but this year it got a real competitor: Yahoo! They were always in the front line, either Google or Yahoo was the most popular, they were changing the pole position just like we change our underwear. But for about 4 months, Yahoo rules the web, considerably. As of why, I have no idea, maybe you tell me?
Even more interestingly Google’s traffic recession can’t be explained by people choosing a new alternative. While Google’s traffic decreased below Yahoo’s traffic, Yahoo’s traffic was steady. The traffic simply started to disappear from Google since the end of April.

The overall traffic on the net, data based on the number of requests sent to the root servers, shows a classy recession in the public traffic too! Maybe people to save some money chose to just not have internet connection? Maybe they don’t have money to pay the costs of having internet at home? Does this explain Google’s traffic recession, too, since more than 32% of the total internet users used Google before April and now only about 28%?

I’d be happy to read your thoughts about how the financial recession affected your life, please share your thoughts.