My friend Scott Rewick made a very interesting comment to me last week at the conference we were at in Los Angeles.  He said that things are changing on the internet.  In the past the more aggressive internet guys “ruled the world”.  And now things are changing, and in future guys like Frank Addante and Eben Pagan will rule the world.

He’s exactly right.  What has been happening over the past 10 years is that the most aggressive marketers with no ethics have been making a fortune online by ripping people off.  And as the internet becomes better organized and more able to route around these people, its starting to change.  It’s a slow change but it is finally happening and is great to see.

As a business this means is that you will have less chance of being scammed and more chance of seeing true value from your partners.  And as an end user, you will be able to trust more of the advertising and applications you see online.

An extreme example is the Olympic champion skiers in Australia (who I’m ashamed of), that made a fortune promoting spyware online.  Once people found out how they made their money there was a huge uproar.  This is finally becoming harder and harder to do.

If you’ve been ripping off your customers and/or partners in the past, its time to change, or you will be left behind  – we’re leaving you behind!  Eben made a trivially simple, yet profound comment at his seminar, which I’ve never heard anyone say before – he wants to work with people who care about their customers.  It sounds so minor, but still is a large percentage of internet business today (including where a lot of Google’s revenues currently come from).

Let me also be clear that this community is very different to the fluffy web2.0 people who don’t generate any revenue.  There has to be both VALUE and REVENUE.  That’s been quite hard for a lot of companies except for Google.  Finally its changing dramatically.