Musings of a VC in NYC

When a VC in NYC wonders "Does Rest Of World Matter More Than The US?" it is of such an interest that I was plugged in to these musings. On this blog the following ComScore numbers for February 2010 were mentioned.

• Google: 890mm worldwide visitors, 745mm non US - 84% non US
• Facebook: 471mm worldwide visitors, 370mm non US - 78% non US
• Twitter: 74mm worldwide users, 53mm non US - 72% non US

The conclusion is:

The conventional wisdom is that international usage cannot be monetized as well as US traffic and that is certainly true. But with >80% of your potential users outside of the US, I think the web sector needs to start working harder on international monetization.
Even if international traffic could only be monetized 25% as well as US traffic, when your international traffic is 80% of your total traffic, you would make as much money internationally as domestically. So that's a lot of potential out there to be tapped.

The traffic numbers for Wikipedia are not different. This is best expressed in the score card graph.

The Google, Facebook, Twitter numbers are considered for their potential of monetisation. For Wikipedia this is not a stated objective. With Wikipedia the aim is to bring knowledge to every human being. This graph shows where these people are. This graph provides an argument where the Wikimedia Foundation should invest to maximise its return on investmentment.
Thanks,
      GerardM