The Internet world is being transformed by a number of powerful forces, three of which stand out: technological progress, a new breed of rich investors and Chinese Internet firms. Technology makes it faster and easier to grow a business, and web companies, of which we have already blogged, are the current trend: initial public offerings (IPOs) of Internet start-ups are springing up everywhere.

In May 2011, LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, was floated on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and was valued at $8.8 billion—572 times its profits in 2010—at the end of the first day of trading.

On 16 December 2011, shares in Zynga, maker of “FarmVille”, “CastleVille” and other online games, entered the Nasdaq, priced at $10 each. After trading started, the shares briefly rose to $11.50 before going down below the IPO price, giving the firm a market capitalisation of about $7 billion. The company boasts 227m monthly active players of its games, and 54m daily users, most of whom play via Facebook.

Today diversity is the default, not the exception. “Minorities” are already the majority in some of the biggest cities in the United States, and demographers predict that the same will be true of the country as a whole before 2050.

Many now favour cross-cultural ads that emphasise what black, Spanish-speaking and Asian-American consumers have in common, which is an effective approach especially for the young. Ogilvy & Mather, a large ad agency, formed OgilvyCulture in 2010 as a unit specialising in cross-cultural marketing. They help brands communicate differences in such a way that they are not seen as borders, but rather bridges that allow people to cross-connect with one another.

Saul Gitlin of Kang & Lee, an agency focused on linking corporate America to the Asian-American marketplace, argues that recent Chinese and Korean immigrants are best reached with communications in their mother tongue. They are generally ignored by advertisers, which is a mistake, since he estimates that the median household income of Asian-Americans is some $10,000 higher than that of non-Hispanic whites.

David Burgos, co-author of Marketing to the New Majority: Strategies for an Integrated World, says that even if minority consumers are the new mainstream, advertisers still put ethnic ads into a separate budget-which tends to be cut first when the economy is bad. Only 7% of marketing dollars are spent on targeted ethnic campaigns; therefore, he thinks ad agencies need a more diverse staff.