A few years ago, most people were scarcely aware its existence. No more. Borat has managed to move Kazakhstan into our collective consciousness.
The country in the world?s ninth largest and covers an area larger than all of the countries in Western Europe combined, and yet has a population of only about 15.2 million.
It is the world?s largest landlocked country, and is bordered by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and China.
According to
www.internetworldstats.com, 1,247,000 people, or 8.2% of the population, are already online. Usage growth between 2000-2007 was an impressive 1,681%, with plenty of room of continued strong growth in this emerging market.
In tandem with the above, credit card ownership is set to dramatically increase in the next few years, with several major banks aggressively promoting the virtues of plastic to this virgin market.
As with so many developing countries, the mobile cell phone network is vastly superior to its fixed-line cousin.
So far, we have paid $2,637.49 to webmasters who have sold passwords to surfers from there, and we expect to see this figure rise dramatically as the market matures.
Whilst not the official state language of Kazakh, Russian is more widely understood there than English, which is why we serve a Russian call-to-action to surfers there who wish to pay for web-content by means of their phone.
As some markets in the developed world are beginning to show signs of having reached critical mass, countries like Kazakhstan represent an enormous opportunity for webmasters to start making some serious money from the hot new Asian growth markets.