31 January 2007 - 20:42I never thought I would do this but…

I’m about to write a post about the internet in .ro
What prompted me to write this post is quite unusual, I listened to a podcast on podio dot ro (do not click this link, type it in your browser) about the typical Romanian internet user. I say that this reason is unusual because I usually keep clear of the guys behind podio and the large crowd of wanna-be’s that hangs out around them. I do this because I have not seen any content worth consuming from them, they keep themselves busy mostly by throwing around English words - such as publishing online, publisher, advertising online, shuttle, Country Manager (I’m copy-and-pasting from one of these guys’ ROMANIAN blog, it cracks me up, this guy is worse than Borat) - which in Romanian sound pretty funny.

Anyway, one guy made an interesting remark about the typical Romanian internet user, it said that you cannot offer something to this user because its internet use if very limited, it resumes to browsing some sports online papers, photos of scantily dressed girls. This guy’s beef was that this type of user holds the Romanian internet industry (yeah, apparently there is such a thing) down because the feature set this user demands is so poor it cannot support an industry. There was some copious discussion about “how to mature such an user” (LOL) so that “it goes from forums to reading/writing blogs” (ROTFL).
Guys, you are beating the wrong horse. The reduced feature set is another example of the rampant poverty in that country. The Romanian society lives pretty much on 2 tiers (tiers which, BTW, have some conflicts from time to time): a small tier placed in the middle-class-to-upper-middle-class income bracket and a very large tier placed in the next-to-or-below-the-official-poverty-level income bracket. As your industry is a service to the whole society it follows quite logically that your main customers will come from the second tier. These guys are pretty much satisfied with what they have right now (i.e. downloading photos of soccer players partying like there is no tommorow) and they do not care much about putting up the photos of the stray dogs parked in front of their appartment blocks on flickr or develop social networks, or God knows what else.

If I were one of the guys on podio I would focus on providing a service to a Westerner, it simply has some more money and probably demands a lot more. The demands of the average Romanian user will probably raise along with its standard of living, while I wish its standard of living go up I wouldn’t hold my breath.

P.S. I also noticed one more thing about the podio guys. They really like to talk about sums of money involving 7 to 8 figures (euros, of course). I wonder what is like to listen to this podcast from a non-descript appartment where every utility bill comes as a knock-out blow. Surreal.