Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Lets say which countries are the highest aside from US, CA & UK?
Oh.. aside from them?
Um... good question...
highest ad inventory of advertisers
On an international scale, how would you search for that? I mean now that you've asked, I'm curious myself.
How would you find those numbers for your own localality?
I don't think you can.
For example in India, there is huge ad inventory for Books, Airtickets, marriage portals, Jobs..
Hardly any inventory for pet care, localized services, art and crafts etc ...
The web is still a little immature here..But the potential is there as more and more companies go online..
USA
CANADA
UK
GERMANY
SPAIN
FRANCE
If a person in Denmark wanted to do a website for an international audience, they would probably write it in English and might save money by hosting it in America. Is that an English website or a Danish one or an American one? For practical purposes I think it should be counted as an "English language" site because that's mainly what determines which inventory Adsense serves to the site. Adsense cares more about the site content than the author's or server's location.
AFAIK Adsense adverts can appear in any language, I have seen some fairly obscure languages in Adsense myself.
English is obviously the most commonly used language on the internet and in international general use, but (Mandarin) Chinese is also spoken by hundreds of millions of people and will become a very common internet language as China grows richer. On the other hand, any use of the Chinese language will probably be restricted to China's borders because very few people outside China will learn it. Most people prefer to learn some European language using Roman characters (English, Spanish, French etc), because they're in such wide use anyway and supported by the majority of hardware and software.
English, Spanish and French have quite a wide international following thanks to the various ex-colonies scattered around the world, and Portuguese is surprisingly common thanks to the Brazilian ex-colony.
German is common on the internet at the moment thanks to its 100+ million speakers almost all living in rich countries, but it will probably decline as time goes on because the countries that speak it all have stable or shrinking populations. Italian will also decline for the same reason. Italy and Germany never had global empires in the way that Britain, Spain or France did, so their languages aren't used much outside Europe. (Yeah, I know about the Roman Empire but no one speaks Latin any more!)
In theory the incredibly fast growth of India and its huge expansion into the IT sector ought to see an Indian language catapulted up the charts of internet use, but in practice the country is extremely splintered without a single national language. There's also the problem of characters, as Indian languages generally don't use Roman letters. AFAIK, the main internet language in India is English, partly because that's the main internet language anyway and partly because of India's historical ties to Britain.
Italy and Germany never had global empires in the way that Britain, Spain or France did, so their languages aren't used much outside Europe.
Italians have been in my home country for 52 years, and many senior citizens speak Italian. Just setting this straight, and surprised how many stories could be left untold :)
[edited by: Habtom at 12:17 pm (utc) on Aug. 13, 2007]
If you are looking for sheer volume of page views per country then there are lists every where.
But specific countries for specific keywords that is a different answer
That seems to be changing rapidly.
I have noted that in my niche many new foreign language sites have been emerging. Some of them are very good and they often provide a local bias to their coverage which my sites could never match. I have noticed that the emergence of these foreign language sites has stalled out the growth of traffic in my niche from many "foreign" countries.
Indeed, I was reading recently that although English is increasing in importance as the language of international business, it is declining rapidly as the language of the masses - largely due to the low birth rates in English speaking countries. Apparently, in 1950 almost 10% of the world population was being raised with their main language being English. By 2050, that percentage is expected to decrease to 5%.
Consequently, although English is very important, people should not overestimate it. Internet takeup rates are growing quickly in non-English speaking countries. Going forward, ad inventory will likely grow at a much faster rate in languages other than English.
37.2% Asia
27.4% Europe
19.8% N America
9.4% Lat America/Caribbean
2.9% Africa
1.7% Middle East
1/6% Oceania/Australia
More info here [internetworldstats.com...]
the main internet language in India is English
The main spoken language by educated people is English, even though the offical government language is Hindi, and even the Supreme Court proceedings are in English.
North America has 19.8% of world internet users with 69% internet penetration.
Europe has 27.4% of world internet users with 40% internet penetration.
Asia already has 37.2% of world internet users with only 12% internet penetration.
Take a guess at where the internet in going to be growing fastest. Take a guess at why so many companies are expending huge amounts of resouces to develop their postions in foreign internet markets.
Take a guess at where the internet in going to be growing fastest.
And take a guess why keyword domain names with non .com extensions are going to be oh so important.
Those users will be looking for .cn, .id, .in etc
Rah rah. Way to go, rest-of-the-world.
You read like an accountant jomaxx! Able to say what's been done however unable to say advise the way to go:-)
Whilst the OP's original question is which country has the highest ad inventory of advertisers, the way to make serious money in the future is to be securely placed to take advantage of future publisher earnings.
For current and future AdSense advertisers inventory trends, monitor Google AdWords online job postings for numbers and caliber required in each country/region there are very clear hints there.
a hundred million online surfers with no credit cards is trumped by few thousands that do all their shopping online.
I concur however I did manage to fond the following information from 18th July 2007:
"Mumbai, July 18 Bankers expect their credit card business to grow by over 30 per cent in 2007-08. Credit cards have seen a gradual growth from about 7.1 million in 2003 to 22.6 million in 2007. There has been approximately a 30-40 per cent growth in the number of cards in force and also the amount of annual spends on cards on a year-on-year basis.
The number of cards in force this year is about 30 per cent more than that in 2006, which was at about 17.5 million."
And the following from 29th March 2007 for China:
"The number of credit card holders in China is expected to exceed 60 million by the end of 2007."
Clearly in both countries there is a huge potential for online sales once more have these facilities. How many card holders in 5 years time for these two counties alone?
250-300 million at a guess?
It would be interesting to read from the Indian AdSensers here their experiences so far.
Ooops...sorry, drifted off-topic!
there is a huge potential for online sales
The operative word here is still 'potential'
The number of credit cards could mean that some banks are issuing free first year promotional cards with new accounts for example, this does not mean that people will actually use them in shops, or are able to find the majority of shops welcoming those cards without incurring an additional processing fee, or the people themselves carrying the cards are mentally ready to make the jump to plastic and credit commerce.. All this and we have not even addressed online business yet, consumers willing to take the online trust leap and part with their credit card number, local merchants being able to open online merchant accounts in their local banks, cyber laws and infrastructure, trust me, it's a lot of factors that have to intersect before the number of credit cards can be any indicator.
One final note: 3rd world Governments are not to be trusted in their reported credit card spending numbers, I have personally investigated 3 countries talked to head bankers as well as high profile merchants, cc numbers as well as online % of the population is often highly 'embellished to attract foreign investment and in some cases aid.
and we are still on topic by the way.
In India at least, users are still comfortable buying only low value products on the net. We in India, have not yet graduated to buying high value goods on the net. The net is used primarily for research and buying is offline.
For my ecommerce site, users still donot trust CC and prefer to pay offline.
The market is still maturing. But with new companies/portals joining the internet bandawagaon, the potential is big, however it is yet to be actualized.
consumers willing to take the online trust leap
It's quite ironical that so many "western" companies outsource their call centres, many to India, and we question whether the Indians have the "trust leap"?
Maybe they know something we do not? :-)
I appreciate your points Hobbs however being an extremely regular business visitor to southern India I have to say that the past few years have seen a veritable explosion in business activities and the average 20-35 year old is no different to their US/UK/EU counterparts with mobile phones stuck to their ears or listening to ipods.
I could also say precisely the same about China, Malaysia etc, their growth trends and transformations are incredible to see compared to the over-regulated UK!
According to this report by ZenithOptimedia, Western Europe is in the lead.
They don't say that exactly, but what I gather is that North America (predominantly USA) is spending 6.8% of $US 190,828 (millions) on internet advertising, which comes to $US 12,976.3 (millions). Meanwhile, western Europe is spending 13.5% of $US 105,391 on internet advertising, and that equates to $14,227.8 (millions).
I might have interpreted the report incorrectly, so if anyone else has a take on this, please share it with us.
I read it as follows:
Total Internet Spend USD Millions
2005 18,712
2006 24,454
2007 31,344
2008 36,926
2009 42,685
Total ALL Media Spend USD Millions
2005 408,849
2006 435,022
2007 458,648
2008 485,101
2009 510,815
The 3 major spending regions are, taking 2006 as an adspend in USD Millions:
1. North America 183,182
2. Western Europe 101,544
3. Asia Pacific 90,542
The Internet has its highest share in the UK where it will attract 13.5% of adspend this year and 21.5% in 2009.
I do not take this to mean 13.5% of 101,544 but 13.5% of the UK total adspend however it does not specify these metrics therefore with North America spending some 80+% more than Western Europe I would say that it's fairly conclusive that region's Internet adspend is easily the highest.
That's my interpretation anyway!
WORLD INTERNET USAGE for June 30, 2007
37.2% Asia
27.4% Europe
19.8% N America
I checked out the link, and a lot of that data isn't sourced.
The calculation is based on population * penetration, which seems like a pretty shaky way to estimate total internet usage.
