Web-based Hypernomics

There are a lot of people active on the web trying to figure out how to make a lot of money by it. A few people have succeeded in this endeavor, but so far business remains slow, even for large-scale investments by big companies, and no one yet has quite figured out the magic formula for converting their web-resources into cash. There is an up-side to this situation, because unlike more traditional business, the little guys have as much chance of succeeding and competing successfully as the big guys--and frequently the top-down, heavily-managed and big-budget sites are no more effective in bringing in customer traffic than better organized and more personal smaller sites.

Without a doubt, "webonomics" is an entirely new kind of ball game that is rapidly undoing many conventional business practices. Many of the old rules just don't apply. Nevertheless, business is increasingly happening and being realized through the Internet, and as it happens, the need for large storage areas, large offices, and other business facilities are disappearing before the increasing need for credit cards, contacts, UPS trucks and effective webmasters.

Hypernomics is a systematic research effort to recognize, better understand and utilize the kinds of "e-resources" that are inherent to the Internet, and their patterning of distribution and functioning over the Internet. Hypernomics depends upon hidden factors that are normally difficult to analyze--external issues of relative page visibility and accessibility on the global topography of the web, as well as often unfathomable internal factors that are even harder to evaluate, including the inherent interest-value of the web-pages presented and the cross-sections and spectrums of the general surfing population who are inclined to remain with any one site more than a few seconds at a time. Because the web is constantly changing, what may be chic and fashionable in web-page presentation one day can very well become old hat and common the next. There is some fine line of trade-off between glitter, flash, and the shear cascade of one page hyperlinks, advertisements, logos and information, and, on the other hand, with a simple, straight style of professional presentation without much background noise.

A big factor in hypernomics is the relative informational value contained in the site. Informational value is the kind, detail, quality and breadth of information given by any particular page, and the cost of retrieving or obtaining this information. Information by itself rarely translates into big bucks, unless it is the download of some computer software program, but the right kind of information configured in the right way and located correctly on the web can make the difference between two visitors a day and a thousand hits in an hour. While this may lead to more headaches than anything else, it is an indirect avenue for realizing greater profitability through the Internet.

Competition on the Internet is the name of the game as well. But competition is rarely direct or of the kind that it usually has been in the traditional business community. One can find not just a few counters available over the Internet, but literally hundreds and thousands. Which is the better one, which is worse? It is impossible to really say and it takes too long to explore every single one available. So you check a few alternatives out until you find one that generally suits your needs--the ones that are easiest to find and most attractive to you. You go with it a while--if it doesn't work you extract it from your source page and download another html markup from another tracking service. There are few areas in hypernomics that are without this kind of broad-based, blind competition, but to pioneer a previously untapped region of possibility in hyperspace is to keep at least a small step ahead of one's competition, which will soon follow anyway.

Successful sites might be more like barnacles on a coral reef--they find an adaptive niche and hunker down to a specific URL for the long term, hoping to eventually garner in more surfers per day, and thus, gradually improve their business. In a world that is scarcely four years old, to be in business even for a year or two is to become a senior, well established site.

One thing is certain. The web is rapidly evolving, and with it web-based hypernomics, both in understanding and in practice, will develop also.