New Survey Says Black Americans Are Thriving In Online Microbusiness

Black Americans are making gains in the online space.

According to Yahoo Finance, Black Americans are more optimistic about online microbusiness — and for good reason. Microbusiness is defined as any business with 10 or fewer employees with a unique domain and an active website. Black-owned online microbusiness, according to GoDaddy’s most recent Venture Forward National Survey of online Microbusiness owners who are customers, comprise one-sixth of the national total and about 1 in 2 Black-owned online microbusinesses that were started since 2020, which is more than five times the share of the pie when it comes to Black-majority owners across US businesses of all kinds. What is Venture Forward? The initiative started in 2018 “to quantify the unique impact of online microbusinesses on their local economies” in an effort to provide unique perspective on the attitudes, demographics, and needs of the entrepreneurs. For the US national survey, it started in 2019 and it transpires twice a year, capturing the responses of 3,500 entrepreneurs or so every instance to “identify and explore trends, as well as deliver insights to advocates of microbusiness entrepreneurs.” GoDaddy analyzes more than $20 million online microbusinesses that have a special domain and active website. Yes, these microbusinesses are small, but their impact on the US economy is outsized, though they are too informal or too new to even show up in the government statistics. While the group may say that they’re twice as likely to access business capital, Black microentrepreneurs are more optimistic about their business outlook and Black microentrepreneurs are most likely to start their own business because they say they wanted to be their own boss. They are also more serious about their entrepreneurial intentions, including having a greater likelihood of secure harboring “long-term valuation aspirations. Just 11% of Black business microentrepreneurs look at their business as just a side hustle, whereas their white counterparts are up to 77%. In addition, they also take their website and E-commerce that much more seriously. Around half of all microbusinesses fulfill sales orders through their website, whereas 28% is the case on the other side, according to Venture Forward National Survey. GoDaddy’s Venture Forward program “captures the outlook needs and demographics of microbusiness owners and quantifies the outsized economic impact of over 20 million microbusinesses — down to the zip-code level. According to Yahoo Finance, “Venture Forward publishes for download its national survey data for the US and UK, and updates its US Microbusiness Density, US Microbusiness Activity Index and US Microbusiness Industry and Commerce datasets via the Microbusiness Data Hub on a quarterly basis.”

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