Top US Sites Rely on non-US Visitors
Posted on November 9, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content |
TO question or not to question, that sometimes needs an answer. What does it mean that the top US site rely on non-US traffic? That we are a global community and the ownership of web properties is irrelevant?
Surely it means more than that. This is from Comscore: “14 of the top 25 U.S. Web properties attract more traffic from people outside the U.S. than from within. Among them are the Top 5 Web properties in the U.S. — Yahoo! Sites, Time Warner Network, Microsoft Sites, Google Sites and eBay.”
US share of web traffic in total has declined as more countries go online and provide local content but the way the world gravitates towards US content seems to be bound up with the facilities and tools on offer there. Yahoo and MSN are like newspapers used to be - provide as much service and information as you can to hook as many people as possible.
What goes with that is an American centric view of the world too. What’s most amazing about the stats is that Fox Interactive is one of the more attractive destinations for non-Americans.
Is it a failure on the part of the non-American web world not to present a better and bigger challenge?
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[...] Will You See Next? » Blog Archive » Top US Sites Rely on non-US Visitors par Olivier Niquet, le 09 / 11 / 2006 Mots-clés: société de l’information document.write(”); 0 [...]
Haynd, very interesting topic. I would imagine there are two things at play here. Firstly, as the North American audience becomes more and more connected and online, it will reach some saturation point or at least slow in growth. Other developing countries like China will account for the continued growth of online readership. e.g. if 25% of China’s population was online, it would equal ALL of the US population. Secondly, despite having only 5% of the world population, US accounts for the lion’s share of marketing/pr/advertising dollars worldwide. Other than established names like Sony, very few companies outside US would think of spending a couple 100 million dollars on launching a game console. So Yahoo and other portals have the resources that become magnets for the entire Internet population at large. I for one would love to see the diversity of search engines, portals etc out of Europe to reflect a different thinking from different cultures.
hadn\’t realised this: Secondly, despite having only 5% of the world population, US accounts for the lion\’s share of marketing/pr/advertising dollars worldwide. But it makes sense when you think Microsoft, poor product, global leader.