Poll: What is your pre-tax net profit for fiscal year 2003-2004?

[Czar]

The language barrier may be hard to overcome for some, but others may take advantage of their own knowledge of multiple languages or commission the services of professional translation services to enter high-growth markets. English is my first language, for example, but I've developed search marketing campaigns in Spanish, Norwegian, French and Russian. I've also worked with translation companies to translate and encode sites for myself and my clients into various Asian languages. Most of the services I employed were relatively inexpensive (not much more than using a professional copywriting service in English).

I'd like to know from where you are sourcing your geographic stats. USA at-home internet penetration has actually been declining in recent months, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, while India's net population has grown at far greater rates than the 30% you suggested every year since 2000, to reach approximately 37 million users presently (according to the Computer Industry Almanac). It's current usage level places it within the 5 most connected countries in terms of total audience, above the UK, France and South Korea.

Anyway, I was just making a suggestion since on one hand you seem to be the doomsayer of the US online media market. It would seem logical, then, that you might like to embrace other markets in order to further diversify your revenue sources, but if you would prefer not to do so, I'm not going to argue.

Regarding the slowdown of ad rates, if you were around pre-2001, you would have noticed that online ad rates used to be even higher than what they are now. Of course, they were artificially inflated at the time through huge injections of capital, high demand and comparitively low supply, but those who survived the massive online ad crash of a few years ago will have no trouble enduring the smaller adjustments that are bound to occur periodically from this point forward.

Fortunately, while advertisers are receiving positive returns on investment (ROIs), they're unlikely to give up on the medium and since online media remains comparitively inexpensive in relation to the broader media market, I don't see any adjustment being dramatic during the next few years. Online's just too darn cheap and effective to fall over any time soon.

[Pilatus]

France actually has a population of 60 mil.
And on azerty keyboards there is an @.

And the language is an official language in 25+ countries.