Facebook, Group on and Twitter Prove Value of Digital Economy

Just two short years ago Facebook was an oddity known mainly to college students and internet geeks, Groupon was largely unknown and Twitter was something no one beyond Brit comedian Stephen Fry could understand.

Fast forward to the present and Groupon slaps Google in the face by rejecting an unprecedented $6 billion offer Facebook hits the $65 billion mark and Twitter gets to say ‘No’ to Facebook and play tootsie with Google over a possible multi-billion dollar deal.

The larger-than-telephone-number price tags and queues of potential investors with seemingly bottomless pockets are a sure sign of the digital economy’s defiance of the global economic downturn. Whatever you may think these pieces of digital real estate are really worth the sure thing is that the web has become the natural refuge of every redundancy package recipient and moonlighting entrepreneur with half an idea on how to make money online. The net result is that we live in a transformed, borderless, always-on world.

Facebook has become the digital frontier’s largest, single, walled garden where 600 million users spending the largest chunk of their online time there are a prize companies and marketers are finding hard to resist. Twitter has proved its worth in being the real-time web’s ultimate news byte machine, bringing news across closed borders in real time with the same ease it carries Charlie Sheen’s fevered tweets and Groupon has managed to crack the Holy Grail of commerce successfully bridging the digital economy with local, offline business and aiming for a 2011 flotation on the stock market.

While the offline world is undergoing a period of transition where operational costs are rising and profit margins are squeezed even further the digital economy is experiencing unprecedented growth. The reasons are easy to understand. When you have an ever increasing online population congregating in specific places and add to it the real-time, niche-audience reach tools offered by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Groupon, you get the inevitable convergence of money which comes with the promise of connecting supply with demand. In plain English it become easier to sell anything to almost anyone.

Lower operating costs means better value which means more sales and greater profits. This is the kind of equation which not only makes perfect sense but only leads to more opportunities, each of which adds greater value to the places on the web where business is possible.

This year is the first, true year of the second decade of the 21st century. If the first decade was the time of the web becoming interactive the second will be that of it becoming ever more profitable with digital companies like Facebook increasing in value in step with the digital economy’s seemingly unstoppable growth.