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Developing World Is a Profit Sink For Web Companies
The NYTimes is running a piece on the dilemma faced by Web entrepreneurs, particularly in social media companies: the developing world is spiking traffic but not contributing much to revenues. The basic disconnect when Web 2.0 business models meet Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East is that countries there are not good prospects for the advertisers who pay the bills. "Call it the International Paradox. Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results. ... Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there. 'I believe in free, open communications,' Dmitry Shapiro, the company's chief executive, said. 'But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it's very difficult to derive revenue from it.' ... Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which [an analyst] recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month."
That's more down to the BBC being funded by TV Licensing.
The reason that Hulu is only available in the US is that international TV licensing is a nightmarish legal morass from which no man emerges fully sane.
I think that there are two distinct phenomena at work here.
"US only" or "Canada Only" and "EU or some subset only" are almost certainly products of wrangling over distribution rights and/or various wrinkles in different countries' compulsory licensing schemes. While those are likely to slowly come down in the long term, they don't have much to do with how profitable various regions are.
The second factor, discussed in TFA, would lead more to "US/Canada/EU/etc. only" or "no third world" and is pretty much exclusively economic in motivation. Clearing the rights isn't an issue with the mass of amateur youtube uploads and the like; but costs of delivery are (at best) constant across the world(at worst, they are likely to be rather higher in poorer areas) and expected revenue certainly isn't constant.
I'll be interested to see if Youtube and the various other *tubes and knockoffs start to offer schemes whereby outfits who want their stuff available outside of the usual geographic areas (ie. propaganda groups for various banned NGOs, governments in exile, and the like) can pay to have them made available. I suspect that that might be attractive; but it might also become useless pretty quickly. If a video service, say, is extremely popular among good upstanding citizens of the regime, who use it to exchange funny cat videos and blooper reels, banning it will be unpopular. If a video service is virtually inaccessible, save for a bunch of videos sponsored by banned/unpopular groups, great firewalling it is a political no-brainer.
i run several large sites, all are very popular in south america, south east asia and middle east
but the bandwidth bills are huge as is in gigabits/s
what we started doing is capping speeds during peak hours to these places simply because not enough money is being made from sales and advertising to pay for it
i know net neutrality people say thats wrong but were not a charity and have to pay alot to carriers :(
There is not a direct translation that I know of, but I'll try to clarify what he means: We are not analphabet sheep herders isolated in the mountains (no pejorative intention here), we are educated people, even with university degrees, but mostly underpaid, unemployed, having to pay ridiculously high taxes but receiving ridicuously bad services from an incredibly bloated and inefficient state. A few days ago I've seen on the TV a field full of tents somewhere in USA, where people suffering from the current crisis had to go to live when they lost their house. That's close to what we mean. Cheers, Daniel from Arg.
--- There is no spoon
Having lived for more than 2 decades in third world countries, there is more going on than you may think.
It is true that may people in developing countries do not have the funds to pay, which is why the advertisers are getting upset. However, in my opinion the biggest problem is that even when you have the funds to pay, you can't find anyone who will accept your money.
For example, how many online stores only accept Credit/Debit Cards, from their own country? PayPal is supposed to provide a solution for this, but only if you live in a western country. If you live in South America, Asia or Africa forget it, you can't use the service.
Even in the poorest developing countries there are still many individuals who have disposable income, but they are limited to spending it within their own markets, because of artificially imposed trade barriers, often set-up by the very companies that complain that they can't penetrate said market.
If you sell widgets online, and only allow payment via a Credit/Debit card with a US billing address, guess what, you will generally only make sales to people in the US. Everybody else relies on grey imports, and often the middle men\importers & smugglers will make more money than you on your own product.
I don't have a complete solution, as the topic is very complicated, but I am trying in my own tiny little way.
www.Buy-Proxy.com - A "buyer-driven" global marketplace.
You're probably right. It probably IS the credit cards. But as an e-commerce seller in the US, I'm going to tell you straight up: I do not and will not accept credit cards from outside of the US. Why? Rampant fraud. Until other countries deal with their fraud issues, there is no way that online merchants of any kind are going to accept credit cards from outside of the US. The risk is waaaay too high.