FT gives regional split of YouTube and MySpace

I thought this was interesting in today's Financial Times (10 Oct 2006). As part of the story of Google buying YouTube, the FT did a comparison of selected websites and community sites. For Google, Yahoo and MSN, their reaches are rather global, Yahoo doing particularly strongly in the USA and Asia, Google in Latin America, and MSN and Google both about as strong in Europe.

Thats not what I found particularly revealing. The more fascinating were the two community sites, YouTube and MySpace. MySpace has a bit more users, at about 85 to 75 million judging from the graphs. But Myspace traffic is about 92% from North America, and almost all of the remainder from Europe. YouTube is much more evenly split, with its largets usage from Asia about 38%, then Europe 32%, then North America 28% and the rest of the world splits the rest.

These are early days, obviously with the community sites (social networking sites). But MySpace is clearly an American phenomenon - which helps explain why Facebook, Cyworld, Mixi etc are able to capture local markets. It is perhaps more a culturally "limiting" space, we want people of our own language, who share in our lives and experiences. At more "content" oriented sites - such as YouTube (and perhaps this will hold true of other content in addition to video, such as Flickr for images etc?) - the site can more easily cross borders and attract a global following.

I don't know, we don't have enough data yet. It may also be that this is simply a quirk of marketing. But it is a fascinating distinction between two roughly as large digital communities, both of which grew out of nothing in the past few years.

We'll keep a close eye on these developments and report on them, of course, as more data becomes available.

Comments

[Raimo van der Klein]

I am sure that in the end 'local' communities are more relevant then local ones. Even in a global community you wish to find a local playground. Probably the problem with object oriented social networks(youtube) is that local content is not sufficient to reach a critical mass to start building the community. A database which is not filled is not relevant nor worth discussing about).

Maybe you need to start global with UGC communities and then split up to local ones with local partners/ads.

Great to start to see some figures about this.

Have a nice day!

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Raimo

Good thinking, yes sounds very likely. We'll follow the matter of course.

Tomi :-)