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You vastly overstate their importance. Yes, they are a big company but as a percentage of all retail sales, they are a pimple on the butt of an elephant. Neither them nor Walmart represent anywhere near 10% of retail sales so it's hard to say they even "dominate" retail sales.

In 2016, total US retail sales were about $5 Trillion. For comparison, Amazon is around $135billion of gross revenue or about 2.7% of retail sales. The other 97.3% is done by others.

Your mistake is understandable as they receive a lot of press.

U.S. online sales in 2015 was $342 billion in 2015 The sum total of U.S. retail sales was $4.785 trillion in 2015 Yes online sales are growing. But they're still only about 7% of all retail sales.

I bought almost everything except groceries from Amazon and Newegg the last decade, but I'm finding myself buying more and more items from brick and mortar stores precisely for the reasons OP gives - counterfeit goods and easier returns. A big part of the reason I bought from Amazon was the no-hassle returns, but they killed that policy this year. Newegg is exempted only because their main warehouse and return center is 2 miles from where I work.

These guys have yet to learn that people are buying them not just for convenience and price, but because they trust that a big name like Amazon will stand behind the product they sell. If they're gonna mix their inventory with that of their third party sellers, well sorry I'm just gonna buy that item from a big name store whose inventory supply chain I trust. My Amazon orders are way down this year, my Costco purchases are way up (they have a great return policy). And I'm even buying stuff from Best Buy again.

I only saw figures from early 2000s, when the total amount spent on advertising in the US averaged out at about $20k per citizen.

You are off by a factor of about 37 - its $540 per US citizen in 2013:
http://www.emarketer.com/Artic...

Given the US median income is now ~$52,000 per household, I'd say its worth advertising agencies to spend that much money. I don't agree with the excessive advertising mind you, but had to call out the number given here as wrong.

It's probably because of low wages too. I remember when I was in Malaysia I was with someone who dropped off some wages for Indonesians working in a Malaysia factory. Now I worked out the hourly rate and when I went back to Taiwan I mentioned it to people who know about things and they were surprised it was lower than someone doing the same job in China.

So a lot of Taiwanese companies like Foxconn are adopting a "China+1" strategy for manufacturing, i.e. factories in China plus one other lower wage country in Asia. Indonesia seems like a good bet for this.

Actually another thing that's interesting is that in places like Indonesia most people have a phone. Smartphone penetration is lower but it is growing fast

http://www.emarketer.com/Artic...

From 12% to 24% in one year. 84% of people have a mobile phone though.

Also if you look here

http://mashable.com/2013/08/27...

There are a lot places with more smartphones per capita than the US (56%). And a lot of them are in Asia - Hong Kong(62%), South Korea(73%), Singapore(71%) being the obvious ones. So the odds are that most Indonesians will buy a smartphone sooner or later. Importing stuff in Asia is a nightmare because of duties and bureaucracy. So one way around that is to make things in country instead of importing them. Foxconn are a contract manufacturer so they make things for other people's brands. It may well be that those brands think that manufacturing in Indonesia is a good bet because of a mix of low costs and the fact that getting a "Made in Indonesia" stamp on the device means they can avoid import duty on the devices they sell there. Also most likely they can get some assistance from the government given that they're building a factory which can employee a lot of people.

Another thing is that Indonesia may have its issues but it is probably easier to get your profits back from Indonesia to Taiwan. I've talked to people in Taiwan who've pointed out that doing that from China is non trivial. The Chinese RMB for example isn't convertible but the Indonesian Rupiah is.

there's 6 billions more people out there

.... 4 billion of whom don't have internet access.

I would say that $18 per user is even little bit low for the value and revenue every user brings to Facebook, ads revenue, sales revenue (from in-game coins), and the social effect of having all the users in the service.

The company is valued at $104Billion which places a value of $115 per user, or £14.80 per person on the planet. Facebook already pockets 14% of all advertising money spent in the US, and with companies such as GM pulling out from facebook, you seriously have to question how much more it can grow it's ad revenue.

And who knows what other monetization Facebook will bring to the table once they get to it.

The kind of aggressive/intrusive monetisation that makes it users leave in droves?

...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....

To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.

In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.

Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.

Facebook has become a giant in web advertising. Their revenue was estimated at $3.8 billion in 2011 (slightly lower than their own prediction of $4b), and to reach $7b next year (2013). Similar numbers have been reported many places, but one source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008598

Total online ad market is at $31b, so Facebook has 12% market share of the global online ad market. source: http://www.iab.net/insights_research/industry_data_and_landscape/1675/1816825 . Their market share of users and time is even higher than that - 16% -- source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-destroying-google-in-time-spent-online-chart/4183

However, the internet audience is extremely insular, rude, and just as selfish and greedy as the MPAA/RIAA (and member companies) when it comes to these things.

and how did you arrive at this conclusion? did you do any research, or did you just assume that all internet users are rude/selfish/greedy/etc.?

actual studies have shown that P2P file-sharing boosts CD sales. so P2P users actually spend more on music purchases than non-P2P users.

your post is a classic example of the reactionary mentality preventing the RIAA/Big Four/major labels from adapting to the new market climate. this attitude of antagonizing & alienating your best consumers is the reason why many RIAA labels are losing money and fans while the industry as a whole continues to experience a net growth.

sure, CD sales (particularly CD singles) are plummeting, but internet download purchases have more than made up for those losses. so it's internet users who are keeping the music industry alive, and even helping it to prosper. but i suppose exploring music online is rather "insular" and "rude." how dare consumers discover music for themselves instead of letting the radio tell them what to purchase.

or maybe the RIAA are just pissed off that their Payola scheme is losing effectiveness.

They're doing different things, to be sure. Women use it more for social activities, men more for browsing and collecting (hunting and gathering?). I think some of the reports consider using e-mail as being online. I do believe that you are correct in saying that men spend more money online than women.

My wife and I are somewhat exceptions in the spending category. Although I spend more time online, and she does spend a lot of time using e-mail, she pays our bills and occasionally buys things online. I almost never do that.

Some Harvard and Berkeley researchers wrote a paper on their findings about Why Phishing Works to explain the success of one type of internet scam.

According to the shitty links here (United States' Internet usage) and here (users aged 3-17) it says that there are 232,655,287 users in the US total and the 34.3 million aged 3-17. That's about 13% and the article is quoting a little higher than that at ~16.5%

Whatever.

And yet how to reconcile this with the recent information that there are more women using the Internet than men? I mean, it's at least plausible that girls/women find the Internet useful but don't have the desire to alter its functionality at all. They may simply be users. Btu one would have to think, given the statistics, that a certain fraction would like to be able to alter functionality (i.e. build web apps, modify current ones, etc.).

I can not help but wonder if CBC, and eMarketer think that Canadian men that sign on as women are probably acting like a bunch of women?

The average cost of 1Mbps of residential bandwidth in North America is six times as expensive as Japan or South Korea and four times higher than France

Now please practive saying: Yes, Lord Vader

yep.

DOS is dead, as well it should be. The concept of a single-user, single-tasking, unprotected memory space OS should have been dead and buried a long, long time ago. The scheduler for DOS is laughable at best, and please don't even mention threading. DOS was never designed to go anywhere but a single PC, unattatched to any network. That's a huge issue today when even your microwave oven has a Net connection. We are becoming a wired society, and the operating systems we use should reflect that.

I guess I just take issue with your assertion that only the "latest and greatest" is worth anything. If you'll recall, the seemingly favorite platform of the majority of Slashdot has it's origins over thirty years ago. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it isn't worth anything. Look at the technical merits of DOS (or anything else, for that matter) before viewing its usefulness in the future.

So how does USPS's 198 billion snail mails compare to the volume of Internet email? This would be a good pointer to obsolence or relevance. Barring exact statistics (pointers anyone?), let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate...

AOL has actually made public some figures for its corner of the Internet; I haven't seen much from other providers, so lets start with that.

AOL is currently claiming to deliver 200 million pieces of email a day. Grossly simplifying, that multiplies out to 73 billion emails a year.

The number of AOL users is 17 million. The number of Internet users, (in the U.S. only, since we're comparing against the US Postal service.) is around 100 million according to figures from Neilsen or MIDS. So AOL has 17% of the US Internet users.

Extrapolating, that implies that the total amount of email being sent is 429 billion pieces. So the Internet has doubled USPS traffic and is still growing, and at a fair pace faster than 3.7%.

USPS for messages is obsolete; for goods, it'll remain relevant.

--LP