In today's competitive online advertising and ecommerce environments, advertisers and retailers alike run the risk of getting lost in the crowd. The Internet market is over saturated. There are literally thousands of websites for any subject imaginable. Consumers have a hard time distinguishing among all the similar options available to them, and therefore tend to visit the largest websites and the largest Internet platforms. Habits are strong human behavior and are hard to change.

With a multitude of purchase options and price comparison tools, differentiating your product or service and building ongoing customer loyalty is proving to be an elusive task. However, as evidenced by the growing trend of online consumers to use the Internet as their primary source for researching products and services, it's becoming increasingly clear that the websites and/or brands that can better educate and inform their potential customers are the ones that will stand apart.

We face a long list of challenges, and we expect a lot of obstacles in our way. The list of challenges is too long to mention in its entirety, but some of most important ones are as follow:

Market Entry: It’s easy to enter the Internet market. Anyone who has some basic knowledge of html and a few dollars to spare can launch a website. It doesn’t take much more than that.

Intellectual Property Protection: It’s pretty easy to copy the content of a website. It’s mostly a copy and paste function. Even if you’re well protected by law and have all the necessary copy rights documentations, the Internet is the World Wide Web and accessible everywhere. There are some countries where copy rights laws are very hard to enforce, and even if enforceable, it takes a long time to be enforced.

Monopoly: We all know that monopolies are no good. Since 1890 when the US Congress adapted the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibited the concentration of economic power in large corporations, or in other words, it opposed monopolies. Congress exploited its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce and to ensure free trade. Congress in its wisdom declared illegal any combination, contract, or conspiracy in restraint of interstate and foreign trade. The Hart-Scott-Rodino act of 1976 and its improvement in later years gave the FTC and the Justice Department more tools to fight monopolies. However, litigation and enforcement against monopolies such as AT&T in 1982 and Microsoft in the 1990s seem to be limited to ‘none-Internet’ companies. Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Ebay are free to operate as natural monopolies in certain Internet arenas.

Technology as a Commodity: Most of the popular programming languages are open source technologies. There are available for everyone to use for free. It’s very hard to have competitive advantage over your competition if you all use the same technology.

Work Force Reliability: A lot of programmers are free lancers. They develop for you what’s supposed to be unique and innovative technology and then they also sell it to other companies, rendering you’re the uniqueness and innovation of your technology useless.

Work Force Scarcity: Good programmers and designers are hard to find. The big and most successful companies pay top dollars for good professionals. It’s very hard for small and under-capitalized companies to compete and hire the best. They have to resort to whatever is left.