4 ms·

How to market your Web 2.0 application in Europe?

9 points by nurall 19y ago

gibsonf1 19y ago
Step 1: Have a version in the native language of the countries you target.
- davidw 19y ago
  This seems obvious, but sometimes I wonder... If you are aiming for a truly pan-european market, that's... let's see: English, Portuguese, Spanish, maybe Catalan if you're picky, French, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian, Maltese(sp?), etc... etc... That adds up really quickly. Also, if you are aiming for a comunity, breaking each little bit off into its own language group might make it take longer to attain critical mass. Also, most young people speak at least some English everywhere. On the other hand, you're never going to be the player in a market if you don't do the language - oknotizie.alice.it came along far after the likes of reddit and digg, and is basically becoming the site for Italy. Even limiting yourself to "important" languages, you have English, French, German followed by Italian and Spanish, which is a lot to chew on if you have lots of text to translate and keep up to date.
  - Tichy 19y ago
    I think ebay and Amazon are doing it by franchising?
  - lkozma 19y ago
    I agree. Another issue is that if you do a local version as an outsider, people will be able to tell that something's just not right, and you'll have a hard time competing with home-grown apps, that understand the local culture much better. There must be some reason that in most of the countries you listed, millions of people still use crappy 10MB e-mail services and social networking sites that are local to the country, and got the cultural factor right. Gmail and Yahoo all try to localize, but most people I know who use them are just annoyed by the translations, and quickly switch back to English.
nurall 19y ago
There was a post earlier on YC about IPTV revolution ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996 ) happening in Europe. It seems to be ahead of the US in terms of marketing of the IPTV medium. This should obviously mean something - 1. Broadband is seriously ubiquitous, at least where it matters 2. TV shows in Europe are boring 3. People are inherently more lazy, this would mean most users are passive 4. IPTV companies/providers have done a better job marketing the medium 5. Internet activity is increasing for all Web segments in Europe. This could be attributed to 1. The economics behind this statistic could be debatable. It could be one of many reasons, but there is reason to believe that, that 'reason' could be good enough to consider marketing aggressively in Europe. Based on these possible inferences, how do you think one should market their Web 2.0 company in Europe? Or should the product/service be such that it doesn't require any special marketing effort in Europe? Any thoughts on this one?
- Tichy 19y ago
  I think that post didn't explicitly mention IPTV, though? More likely, people download their favourite TV series via bittorrent. And that would be the less lazy people, who are motivated to find the TV show on the web, and watch it in original language. Here in germany we see a lot of clones of successful concepts from the US. Today I saw an ad for a new phone which comes bundled with something called wubbler (or something like that, can't remember). I bet that's a Twitter clone...
jsmcgd 19y ago
Europe is a pretty big place with little consensus on anything. Perhaps you should ask, 'How should you market your Web 2.0 application in the UK?', 'How should you market your your Web 2.0 application in France?' etc etc. The answers may be mostly similar however the differences could be very compelling.
- weel 19y ago
  You're right about that, but at the same time, this is also exactly the problem. If you aren't going to be able to take up the Luxembourg market without paying particular attention to the cultural and linguistic peculiarities of Luxembourg (hint: 3 languages), then the conclusion for many companies is going to be that it's not worth worrying about Luxembourg at all. Then again, if nobody worries about Luxembourg, that opens up a decent opportunity for somebody to just copy a bunch of existing ideas for the Luxembourg market. And that's why people are looking for ways to overcome the problem of cultural fragmentation and make it profitable, even for a small company, to target the European market.
ks 19y ago
Facebook is quickly becoming popular in Norway without local translations. Other services like Youtube and Flickr is also very popular. We have local alternatives too of course. What I would like is if US companies would hire a Norwegian lawyer to write the Terms of Service. It's pointless to agree to some terms that have no base in Norwegian law. You could also try to support a more free form registration form. Not all countries use the same types of zip-code and phone number... And support UTF-8 (or at least ISO-8859-1). Most European languages use characters not found in the English alphabet (Norway has an additional three characters: Æ, Ø and Å, let's see if this form supports them. Should be displayed as &AElig, Ø and Å)
- ks 19y ago
  OK, this is a good example. The site does not support Æ, Ø or Å :-) It was only displayed correctly when I entered their HTML entities. If this page were meant for Europe, it would fail. When you are building a social site it is important that people can use their own language.

9 points by nurall 19y ago

gibsonf1 19y ago

Step 1: Have a version in the native language of the countries you target.

davidw 19y ago
This seems obvious, but sometimes I wonder... If you are aiming for a truly pan-european market, that's... let's see: English, Portuguese, Spanish, maybe Catalan if you're picky, French, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian, Maltese(sp?), etc... etc... That adds up really quickly. Also, if you are aiming for a comunity, breaking each little bit off into its own language group might make it take longer to attain critical mass. Also, most young people speak at least some English everywhere. On the other hand, you're never going to be the player in a market if you don't do the language - oknotizie.alice.it came along far after the likes of reddit and digg, and is basically becoming the site for Italy. Even limiting yourself to "important" languages, you have English, French, German followed by Italian and Spanish, which is a lot to chew on if you have lots of text to translate and keep up to date.
- Tichy 19y ago
  I think ebay and Amazon are doing it by franchising?
- lkozma 19y ago
  I agree. Another issue is that if you do a local version as an outsider, people will be able to tell that something's just not right, and you'll have a hard time competing with home-grown apps, that understand the local culture much better. There must be some reason that in most of the countries you listed, millions of people still use crappy 10MB e-mail services and social networking sites that are local to the country, and got the cultural factor right. Gmail and Yahoo all try to localize, but most people I know who use them are just annoyed by the translations, and quickly switch back to English.

nurall 19y ago

There was a post earlier on YC about IPTV revolution ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996 ) happening in Europe. It seems to be ahead of the US in terms of marketing of the IPTV medium. This should obviously mean something - 1. Broadband is seriously ubiquitous, at least where it matters 2. TV shows in Europe are boring 3. People are inherently more lazy, this would mean most users are passive 4. IPTV companies/providers have done a better job marketing the medium 5. Internet activity is increasing for all Web segments in Europe. This could be attributed to 1. The economics behind this statistic could be debatable. It could be one of many reasons, but there is reason to believe that, that 'reason' could be good enough to consider marketing aggressively in Europe. Based on these possible inferences, how do you think one should market their Web 2.0 company in Europe? Or should the product/service be such that it doesn't require any special marketing effort in Europe? Any thoughts on this one?

Tichy 19y ago
I think that post didn't explicitly mention IPTV, though? More likely, people download their favourite TV series via bittorrent. And that would be the less lazy people, who are motivated to find the TV show on the web, and watch it in original language. Here in germany we see a lot of clones of successful concepts from the US. Today I saw an ad for a new phone which comes bundled with something called wubbler (or something like that, can't remember). I bet that's a Twitter clone...

jsmcgd 19y ago

Europe is a pretty big place with little consensus on anything. Perhaps you should ask, 'How should you market your Web 2.0 application in the UK?', 'How should you market your your Web 2.0 application in France?' etc etc. The answers may be mostly similar however the differences could be very compelling.

weel 19y ago
You're right about that, but at the same time, this is also exactly the problem. If you aren't going to be able to take up the Luxembourg market without paying particular attention to the cultural and linguistic peculiarities of Luxembourg (hint: 3 languages), then the conclusion for many companies is going to be that it's not worth worrying about Luxembourg at all. Then again, if nobody worries about Luxembourg, that opens up a decent opportunity for somebody to just copy a bunch of existing ideas for the Luxembourg market. And that's why people are looking for ways to overcome the problem of cultural fragmentation and make it profitable, even for a small company, to target the European market.

ks 19y ago

Facebook is quickly becoming popular in Norway without local translations. Other services like Youtube and Flickr is also very popular. We have local alternatives too of course. What I would like is if US companies would hire a Norwegian lawyer to write the Terms of Service. It's pointless to agree to some terms that have no base in Norwegian law. You could also try to support a more free form registration form. Not all countries use the same types of zip-code and phone number... And support UTF-8 (or at least ISO-8859-1). Most European languages use characters not found in the English alphabet (Norway has an additional three characters: Æ, Ø and Å, let's see if this form supports them. Should be displayed as &AElig, Ø and Å)

ks 19y ago
OK, this is a good example. The site does not support Æ, Ø or Å :-) It was only displayed correctly when I entered their HTML entities. If this page were meant for Europe, it would fail. When you are building a social site it is important that people can use their own language.