The US is a pretty big market. 320,000,000 people, most with at least some disposable income. There are also plenty of advertisers that want to market their products to Americans, which means you can choose between ad-sponsored or for-pay business models.
There are also plenty of companies targeting the US market. The rest of the world? Not so much.
To give you an example: there is no reddit equivalent in French. The closest things we have are a few French-speaking subreddits that have very few subscribers since reddit scares people who don't speak English before they can reach the French-speaking subreddits. We also have a few very poor quality reddit rip-offs with no users.
Granted, the French-speaking world is not as big as the US market. But 100 million people is already a decent target, don't you think?
Funny story about that. We (reddit) had a long debate about what the default UI and content should be back when we internationalized (2008 I think?). Should we use the Accept-Language header to select both the UI and the content, or just the UI? We started by making the assumption that if your preferred language was French, for example, you'd want French content.
We got a ton of feedback from French speakers that they preferred the English content, so we ended up settling on selecting a UI based on the A-L header but giving the default English content (unless you specifically set it otherwise).
That's interesting. I think your decision makes sense, since your french users all speak English and you have much more content in English. In fact it personally irks me when I see reddit's UI in French (for example when I'm not logged in) because I'd rather have the whole site in English than parts of it in French.
In any case I think that if you really wanted to target the French-speaking population, it would be best to have a separate site or at least a clearly separated part of the site.
If it's user-created content, then it has a serious network effect - for the smaller communities, they will often prefer larger(=~better) english content to a smaller pool of their local content.
It would be a different story if the content available was comparable, but it usually isn't.
Just to give you an idea of how underserved the French market is, here's the closest French equivalent I've found to Hacker News: http://news.humancoders.com/ On a busy day, front-page stories get maybe 2 or 4 upvotes. If there's anything better out there, I haven't found it.
The French consumer market has tons of holes like this. And we're talking about a huge, wealthy market with plenty of mobile devices and solid broadband. It's not a wide-open market, but there are tons of opportunities.
I'm hearing more and more about French startup accelerators, and I'm seeing a lot more seed-stage startups. So people are making an effort to serve this market. But there's still a lot of opportunities.
Minitel adoption was never as big as with the current Internet, and users didn't suddenly migrate from one to the other. Minitel mostly bled to death as the Internet grew in popularity.
Minitel killer app was the yellow pages.
The other predominant usages were mail order and sex chats/porn. Some games too but nothing significant and nothing social, at scale at least.
That's surprising since Reddit at least translates their site into every language - how many times have you googled something and gotten back a reddit hit for an English language reddit page but with Portuguese UI? so reddit has done more than many to internationalize their site.
Probably a strip of language names along the top, taking you to language-filtered frpnt-pages would help. It would be ugly, but it's Reddit.
Subreddits have a "language" setting, although the data is probably dirty since the value is unused AFAIK - for all we know /r/pics is currently set on "Klingon". The Reddit admins would probably have to do some manual dirty-work, but iirc the "default subs/front page" reddit listing is somewhat manually curated anyways.
either way, if you stick to the idea of an entirely french version, fr.reddit.com/r/football will lead you to the american football subreddit, but for a french guy they would expect soccer to be there...
It's still gread that they provided a multilingual UI, but as a whole, us companies could always use to understand the foreign market a little bit better than just providing a UI translation...
This. India is a billion people and maybe 10-20% have internet access. Of those 10-20%, the vast majority do NOT have $20k to spend ($20k is the average consumption level of the poorest Americans). China and the Philippines are certainly richer, but not drastically so.
Rough numbers: USA is a $16T economy, most of which is on the internet. China is an $8T economy, most of which is not. India is $1.8T.
There is certainly opportunity here, particularly in the long term (probably why Facebook bought them), which is why I'm in India introducing people to BayesianWitch. But be realistic about the market.
The EU is a $16.5T economy, most of it on the internet, vastly underserved by internet companies compared to the U.S. Even Facebook was English only until 2008. Big business opportunities are being missed there.
The smorgasbord of languages and cultures makes it harder to target though. But German, French and Spanish markets are big in their own right, especially if you consider you can reach other territories with them as well. (Austria, Switzerland and to some extent eastern Europe with German; Canada and much of connected Africa with French; Phillipines and Latin America with Spanish.)
You won't find many Spanish speakers among the younger generation in the Philippines, and that's your target market. You'd be better off using English or Taglish for the Philippines.
And most of the most appealing-to-business sub-populations in a lot of these countries read english well enough that an English-language product captures a lot of them.
Please, the EU is made up of individual countries with individual languages with individual histories and cultures. Comparing it to the US is ridiculous.
Internet penetration in India is at the lower end of your estimate - 124 million in 2012 (1).
In contrast, the wireless subscriber base was 875 million in 2013 (2).
Source:
1. “Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia's Next Superpower” by McKinsey; Published 2013
2. TRAI: Highlights on Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st October, 2013
This is also why Brazil is heating up so much in terms of start-up interest. It has a large population speaking the same language with significant income and a single government. And its government tends to be somewhat less nervous making (at least in some regards) than China's.
I think the attraction of the US market is that is big AND homogeneous: the EU in its entirety for example has more people and comparable wealth, but it's made up of dozens of countries, each with its own language and regulatory laws, which complicate the development of any app/service.
The laws are actually quite uniform, it's actually easy to release an app in multiple languages using one company in the UK, for example.
The hard part is getting partners or marketers everywhere, making sure they understand what you're trying to accomplish, making sure they don't rip you off and start their own clone with all your users and somehow providing support for all those people speaking different languages.
And of course, then there's the payments - receiving/sending payments is very hard, every country has their own preferred method that does not integrate with others at all.
I believe he means homogeneous as in "speak the same language, share a similar culture". If you tell a French person he's exactly the same as a German person, he will probably disagree.
