Barros began his presentation by describing what it was like to do business last year. “2020 found us in the middle of a desert: overnight, the normal functioning of our businesses, our companies, and our ventures was turned upside down, once and for all. The first thing we all asked ourselves was, ‘Where are the customers? What are we going to do now?’”
To provide some context, he reviewed some global figures:
- 7.83 billion people
- 5.22 billion unique mobile users
- 4.6 billion internet users
- 4.2 billion social media users
These last three items make up the e-commerce landscape that companies face today.
Navigating the Online Market
“There is an emerging market that we may not have been giving enough consideration to: the virtual market. There are 2.5 billion people who log on daily to online games, virtual reality, and three-dimensional interfaces. This number amounts to one-third of the world’s population,” said Barros, a multimedia artist and coordinator of ORT’s Bachelor’s Degree in Design, Art, and Technology.
Just when we thought there were no customers—that we were, in a way, in the desert—we suddenly realized that we have a potential market equivalent to one-third of the world’s population. The customers are right here.
Barros argues that there is a new economic frontier today: the virtual economy. This became evident in March, with the sale of a digital artwork for $70 million. “There was an entire universe generating millions and millions of dollars. As someone with a master’s degree in Digital Arts, I had always believed, throughout my professional career, what all my colleagues believed: that it was a non-commercial art form.”
However, the commercialization of digital art is not a new phenomenon. For example, in September 2018, a “digital kitten” sold for $170,000. “What the pandemic did was, in a way, bring it to light, showing us all of this that was thrust upon us overnight and left us quite astonished.”
Growth in spending on digital games
- 2015: $62 million.
- 2019: $109 million.
- Year 2021: $129 million.
This data lays the foundation for a new virtual economy: blockchain, a chain of data blocks where each block affects the next, so that if one is broken, it affects the others. “What blockchain enables is a massive volume of transactions regulated and audited by the chain itself; the possibilities are endless.”