Does Rest Of World Matter More Than The US?

Quoting from the final para of the article: There's a lot of money "rest of world" and I suspect that will only be more and more true over time.<p>I generally really like Fred Wilson, but talk about stating the obvious. Given that the EU has a greater population, a higher total GDP, more broadband subs and equivalent or greater broadband penetration than the US - it also sounds a bit patronising. And that's before one considers the BRIC countries, or the rapidly developing internet economies in places like SE Asia.

The USA, at 300 million people, is only 5% of the planetary population (over 6,000 million people).<p>Even if you discard huge chunks of the developing world as not a reliable market, you've got 500M people in the EU, 200M+ in the developed Pacific Rim (Japan, SK, Taiwan), 300M middle-class Chinese, and so on. It probably adds up to 1-1.5Bn developed world citizens.<p>For a 5% minority, the USA punches above its class at 20% of traffic ... but in the long term, hopefully it will trend towards only 5% of traffic. (I say "hopefully" because that'd indicate the rest of the world was at the same average level of connectedness ...)

It depends on the stage of your business. A young American startup with limited resources should focus on getting the product right before it starts worrying about localization and monetizing international traffic.

Of course it does.

The site I work for only accepts members from US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia. It has to be that way to combat fraud. The non-us traffic for other sites I've built has meant one thing: spam. If there was a way to better filter out fraud and spam from certain countries, I bet one could hit that 25% number easily.

I’m really surprised that something as distinctly American as Facebook could enter the German market with the force that it did. Germany had its own very successful Facebook clone long before Facebook started its international push but Facebook is so far fighting a very respectable fight (13M vs. 16M visitors).<p>I wouldn’t have guessed that. I really wouldn’t have thought that Facebook could be as successful in Germany as it is. I don’t know whether that means that the rest of the World matters more for Facebook than the US – but there certainly seems to be enough room abroad to be successful.

Well, yes, but if you can hit the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada in English, it does make English the most important language. That is, English is not greater than all the other languages, but it is greater than any other single language.<p>How long will this last? I don't know -- probably until China and India have proportional GDP spending.