Does Rest Of World Matter More Than The US?
I spent some time on Comscore this morning looking at US vs Rest Of World traffic for some of the largest web properties. Here are the stats for Feb 2010: — Google: 890mm worldwide visitors, 745mm non US - 84% non US
Context & Ripple Effects
Fred Wilson's question lands on top of an arc the corpus has been tracing since 2007, when comScore counted 772 million people online worldwide and an AP study found Google already drawing the bulk of world search. His own blog has tracked this from the publisher side too — a 2008 post mapped where his site's traffic actually comes from.
The new wrinkle in the February 2010 comScore figures is the ratio itself: Google drew 890 million worldwide visitors and 745 million of them were outside the US — 84%. That reframes the US from the core audience of the largest web property to roughly one visitor in six. The timing also matters: days earlier, Google had stopped censoring its Chinese services on www.google.cn, a reminder that the biggest non-US market carries regulatory risk along with the scale.
First-order effects
- Anyone pricing or benchmarking large web properties off comScore-style panels now has to weight non-US audiences as the majority share — for Google, four out of every five monthly visitors are outside the US.
- US-centric ad planning undercounts the addressable audience on global platforms by more than half, since marketers buying against US traffic alone are ignoring most of Google's reach.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals and search engines competing for advertising dollars face the same arithmetic, pushing product and sales priorities toward international markets where the incremental users actually are.
- Investors evaluating consumer web companies will discount pure-US growth stories relative to ones demonstrating international traction, since the comScore data shows scale now accrues mostly abroad.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the center of gravity for consumer web strategy shifts from US-first launches to products designed for a global majority from day one — while the google.cn censorship standoff illustrates that the largest non-US market trades scale for political and regulatory exposure.
- Measurement firms like comScore gain leverage as the arbiters of worldwide audience rankings, since valuation debates increasingly hinge on their international counts rather than US-only panels.
The trend: The audience base of major web properties is decisively shifting outside the US, forcing investors, advertisers, and builders to treat global reach — not domestic dominance — as the default measure of internet scale.