"Everyone is only interested in money" announced the dean of the International IT University of Kazakhstan in the course of our conversation as we discussed potential trajectories of development of Kaznet. The needing to fill Kaznet was his big spiel and he was extensively talking about monetization, opportunities, commercial development and the oodles of money that the Kazakh government is about to dump into Kaznet. Then he tried to offer me a teaching job...
The issue of what KazNet and internet in general might bring to Kazakhstan and what might make money through the Internet, how might something like Facebook originate in Kazakhstan is on the minds of many business people, politicians and regulators right now. "Do you think something big can actually be born in Kazakhstan or is that the prerogative of the West and North America and we just can't manage, our minds are too closed and not enough?" asked me a business man who runs all of SAP implementation in Kazakhstan right now and is developing a professional information exchange forum as a form of public service (from his point of view).
KazNet is empty but the current buzz is that despite its emptiness more than 3.16 million users actively access it on at least a bi-weekly basis and nearly 5 million are passive users (those that have their friends or family access the Internet for them). The active number so far has been confirmed from several sources - this is over 20% of the population on the internet. The passive number is an odd one because it is not clear to me how that was actually calculated but the policy guys really like throwing it out there in conversations. Over the course of the last three years, the Internet has become more affordable, and, surprisingly, more users are coming through mobile connections. This of course, generates some expectation of monetization potential.
There is no real way yet to accept payment over the Internet for local businesses but that is coming (and the person developing that service told me that it is coming this summer. He was expecting a huge jump in usage from the development of local commerce and of local content. Of course, this was also the person who asked why I bothered researching Kazakhstan since by all general markers, the Kazakh market looks exactly like everywhere else - we all access search engines and social network sites more often than anything else, so that must really mean we are all the same.
The local content point is real and important - there is little local content produced inside kaznet (the most read blogger sites are blocked, many alternative news sources are blocked, and the kind of local that is allowed to develop is no more interesting than the regular local newspaper). How such local content might be developed and be more interesting than extensive discussions of everything local on the ct.kz forum nobody knows and the ct.kz originators scoff at the notion, but there indeed is a push to localize KazNet because it is seen as the only way to really get it off the ground. For now, the internal traffic on KazNet is people downloading pirated movies and music and nearly everything else is external. What is even more curious is that none of the internet developers that I have talked to, the dean of the IITU included, know much about how people actually use the Internet... aside from the traffic patterns they see from KazakhTelecom. When I explain that many people see the Internet as a place to find other people, they are surprised and then come up with their own explanations for why this is an unimportant insight, not useful to the overall thinking of how to monetize the Internet... after all, everyone is interested in money.
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