Why American business needs the UK

Both Matt Cutts and Jeremy Schoemaker post their blog stats online.

What’s really interesting is comparing the stats together, to peice an image of the English language internet.

For example, Matt Cutt’s site has the largest data sample, and in a simple and succinct manner I think most clearly demonstrates an image of the English language internet:

Combine both sets of stats by geo-location and you end up with a graph like this:

What it clearly shows is the complete dominance of the USA for English-speaking internet traffic.

Now, the traffic for Shoemoney.com and Mattcutts.com may well be skewed towards webmasters - the high Indian referrals I think is particularly indicative of that.

For example, when I compare the geolocation to my highest traffic site, chronicles network, India is barely in the Top 20 geolocations for the 135k unique visitors:

Now, I know we’re dealing with generalisations in a much more complex environment than a couple of data sets, each with their own bias, can properly demonstrate. But it’s the generalisations here that I find interesting.

For example, the relative importance of the UK as an internet audience.

Let’s underline that: the relative importance of the UK as an internet audience.

From the figures above, the UK accounts for between 25%-15% of English-language internet traffic.

Which is all the more astonishing when search engines send big names to search and marketing shows in the USA - but only a couple of unknown PPC account managers to SES London. And no parties.

More seriously, it shows why the general contempt US companies have of the UK is so undeserved.

Perhaps particularly, the wide spread of geographical traffic shows how ridiculous it is that the Yahoo! Publisher network (YPN) - Yahoo! rival to Google AdSense - is still only able to work with US webmasters.

Let’s be simplistic and presume the above figures translate into potential contextual revenue streams as well.

Now, if the YPN were to generate $100 million from US webmasters only, then from the simple presumption above, including UK webmasters could boost that by around $25-15 million.

Which leaves the question - how much does it really cost to integrate the UK into the YPN?

And begs the question - why is the US so slow to take the UK seriously as a marketplace?