I work for a startup who's current main source of revenue is advertising based. We are leading in our space in the US, but lagging behind some competitors globally. Given how we all make money, I think this is a pretty good situation to be in.<p>What do you think, would you rather be leading in the US, and other more highly monetizable markets (Germany, Japan, UK, etc), or be leading in an absolute, global scale, even if a good chunk of your traffic won't necessarily bring revenue?
Profits = Revenue - Costs<p>If you can't make money there, and with the business you're probably in, the costs are significant when it comes to bandwidth, then you should not be there.<p>We're also not talking about a <i>gain lots of users and monetize later</i> type of plan like Twitter. There's no money to be made in these countries. With the economy being the way it is, and being a startup, you can't run yourselves into a wall of knives.<p>Also look at it from a competitive angle. What would you think if your competitors went there just to be a <i>bigger brand</i>. You'd probably think they made a bad move. If dominating countries that are monetizable doesn't make you a big enough brand, dominating in countries that don't bring revenues surely won't. It will probably make you go broke.
I would say it depends on marginal cost of growing in other markets. If you need to localize the site/content and/or need offline presence (sales team, etc), it might not be such a good idea.
If all you need to do is strike a couple of content partnerships or PR exercise in those regions and can be handled by one person - you must go for it... Growth of Orkut/Linkedin/Facebook in India is a good example<p>Monetization might be lower today, but things may (and will) change going forward...