Arbitrage & Macro-Trends

As an entrepreneur the biggest advantage you have over big businesses is that you can spot trends early and invest in them before they have a chance to tamper with the market. I got on the web in 2003 and launched this blog about SEO before the end of that year. That was great timing both for the SEO market and for seeing the blogging trend. While Google is killing a lot of the made for AdSense spam, the next big trend trend is probably going to be web video. But you have to act quickly to lock in large gains. Within days of Google integrating video into their search results, many of BuyDomains.com's video related domains were gone. Overnight the price of some of those domains probably increased 10x. Lots of people are investing in everything social...I think that trend is over-hyped and already on the decline. Nearly daily PR firms send me emails promoting social content stuff from people who clearly are writing about a topic they have no real knowledge of. By the time people who don't care about a market are drawn to it you know it is time to look elsewhere.

But as big business jumps into a wide variety of markets, you look at the information pollution created and realize that many people will be unable to tell the difference between information and what may as well amount to machine generated content.

Search is over-hyped too, but Google is making the search results more interactive in an attempt to re-accelerate that growth. They are evolving search with the web. The fact that they are pushing video means that it wouldn't be a bad idea to do so too. But you probably are not going to make much of a dent in the market as a YouTube or MetaCafe clone. There are a ton of markets where the top ranked organic results are of low quality and will soon be replaced. I think the next big trend on the web is remarkable micro-brands and high quality original editorial channels...video and text.