How digital currencies are changing the internet marketing landscape

Doge-Wow
How digital currencies are changing the internet marketing landscape

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The digital currencies, such as Bitcoin have been around for years now and are increasingly popular means of paying online. As with everything, people are finding ways of making money off of these currencies.

As usual with the internet, the entry barriers to these operations are low and therefore attract masses that are looking at making money, especially in India and other non-developed but highly digitally literate countries.

In this article, we cover how digital currencies have changes the internet marketing landscape.

New way of utilizing the technical skills

Many of the smart and talented kids across the world are making money mining the bitcoins or some of the other, less popular and newer currencies. They’re using their hardware understanding to create low power usage computers with maximized CPU to turn the electricity costs into profitable lottery tickets in the block-chain.

bitcoin-mining-farm
A bitcoin mining farm

What this means is that less kids are out there on the internet marketing field, looking at setting up virtual machines on computer hardware, or automated human-like robots for spamming functions on different machines. These skills are simply more valuable elsewhere now.

Black-hats evolving into new schemes

Lets face it – in any industry there are massive dark sides and shady, low ethics personnel. This has always been especially the case with the internet and it’s no surprise – the internet is not regulated, it gives access to massive amounts of people and the countries making most money from internet marketing are relatively poor countries where people are forced to take any measures to make a living.

internet-marketing-spamThe forms of this dark side were massive amounts of e-mail spams trying to sell Viagra or scams of dead West African princes with big inheritances. It evolved into black-hat SEO – spamy methods of getting the ranking job done, as well as chat spam-bots trying to get you to signup for web-girl sites and similar.
With all these digital currencies however, we are seeing many shifts away from these methods into a whole new world of illegal or gray areas of the law. For instance, the internet currencies have opened doors to a new world of illegal marketplaces – drugs and items of various sorts, sometimes digital.

People can now buy them anonymously and so there is a massive demand for all kinds of services and items to be fulfilled by the underground entrepreneurs. All of these activities still require the help of internet marketers – promoting the services and posting about them on the dark web.

To put it in another way – many of the people that would have been sending mass-scam e-mails 15 years ago are now selling illegal drugs online. Similarly, the guys that would of been sending you the Viagra spam mails are now running illegal dark-web gambling joints or selling counterfeit goods online.

The more legit guys, the ones that maybe would of gotten into selling useless internet marketing products with ruthless sales tactics are now into selling VPN’s or other privacy promising software’s and services.

Manipulation of the market prices

While this might belong under the black-hats section, it deserves it’s own title.

There are a lot of currencies popping up and some are set up or overtaken early purely to promote them and get the market price up to make the initial founders or early buyers rich. It sort of works like a pyramid scheme – you buy up a new currency and then promote it and try to make people to buy it up, increasing your value along the way.

The well-skilled internet marketers, especially in the social media world and similar, are getting in on this game. This are also the people that would’ve made a killing selling useless “get rich quick schemes” in the past.

A good example is the Doge Coin. It is based on the Dodge internet meme and naturally it became viral on the internet. The market cap of this currency went massively up at one point to $60 million USD and fell down to $22 million as of 2016. Read more on what is Dogecoin & how does it work – The Ultimate DOGE Guide

Naturally, some people lost money when they thought it will be the next Bitcoin and some made money – the early adopters, buyers and promoters of the currency. Because of the meme nature of the currency, it of course went viral and was so easy to promote. Just take a look at some of the pictures circulating the web at the time:

putin-doge-coin

Doge-Wow

dogecoin-rich

New wave of services and contents

The internet marketers that adopted the trend early on saw a massive demand for contents, creating small fortunes blogging about the currencies and creating media sites around the block-chain currencies.There have also been enormous amounts of sites picking up offering services within the sector. Sites like Coinmarketcap that provide information on the prices, as well as numerous coin exchanges and similar sites.

Concluding

Many digital online businesses, schemes and operations have popped up out of the cryptocurrencies. Some have been good innovations with potential to improve the society, yet also damage it with illegal substances and new types of scams.

This is as usual with the internet but something that’s changing is that we are becoming more digital than ever, the internet in its scope and acceptance is widening, providing more and more opportunities for people across the world to make money.

Author Profile

Fernando BiZ
The Founder & CEO of ClickDo Ltd. Writes about digital marketing and SEO for local businesses in International corporation. You can read more on OM HQ blog for more of my writings.
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