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As internet access grows, so do job opportunities, according to new data from web hosting company GoDaddy.
The domain registrar’s research arm, Venture Forward, teamed up with economists at the UCLA Anderson Forecast to analyze state and local economic activity alongside web-hosting data, ultimately returning a composite score for the robustness of online business in a given area, Alexandra Rosen, global head of Venture Forward, told Tech Brew.
The most recent results, released Tuesday, revealed that “digital infrastructure improvement created nearly 300,000 jobs nationwide between April 2020 and March 2024,” GoDaddy said in an email via PR rep Milan Penny.
The data showed that Southern states, “in particular, have seen unparalleled growth in micro-business activity and job creation due to improvements in digital infrastructure,” the company said, including in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Mississippi, added Rosen.
The cumulative effect in the data partnership has given analysts a broader lens to identify digital business trends and to pinpoint the effects of internet infrastructure growth, according to Rosen.
“We went from being able to say that one entrepreneur at a county level creates about two jobs or more, to this year, we said they actually create seven jobs,” she told us. “Until we had this many years of data, [we hadn’t] been able to stay that before: That digital infrastructure, combined with skills of how you use it, creates these trends.”
Rosen pointed to Miami, New York City, and Las Vegas as areas that have some of the densest environments for small, online business activity—sometimes up to 20 micro-businesses per 100 people on the county level. That directly ties back to infrastructure improvements and consumer uptake, she said.
“We know that it corresponds to, the more internet is available and people can use it, the more [micro-businesses] we’re seeing. And then, again, that leads to economic activity,” she said.
The report noted that the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which allocated $65 billion for broadband infrastructure to be awarded on a state-by-state basis, “continues to contribute [to] further increase of this index, particularly in rural regions.”