Re:Beware of Freeconomics
by nraynaud on Tuesday February 26, 2008 @06:47PM
(#124307)
I have another problem with the wired article, It assumes economy scale, but here in Europe, we have at once one bigger market than the US, but way more fragmented for web stuff : social websites market border are language border (27 languages here).
This means that when I launch my service in French, I'm stuck with France and Belgium (70millions people, too bad Switzerland is not in EU). If I add, say German (80millions people more), I won't leverage on 150million people because of the linguistic border. Moreover, adding a language costs me almost the same price each time, it doesn't really drops with the time, since I start with an audience of zero in the new territory.
This means that here in Europe, economies of scale are not as easy as in the US, where there is a continuous market for 300 million people.
Moreover, with the worthless dollar, Adsense revenue tends to drop, but this not a structural issue, I have to seek an euro-based ad system.
This means that when I launch my service in French, I'm stuck with France and Belgium (70millions people, too bad Switzerland is not in EU). If I add, say German (80millions people more), I won't leverage on 150million people because of the linguistic border. Moreover, adding a language costs me almost the same price each time, it doesn't really drops with the time, since I start with an audience of zero in the new territory.
This means that here in Europe, economies of scale are not as easy as in the US, where there is a continuous market for 300 million people.
Moreover, with the worthless dollar, Adsense revenue tends to drop, but this not a structural issue, I have to seek an euro-based ad system.