Those English speaking markets didn’t have long to wait.Īustralia, Canada and New Zealand all had local YouTube portals by the end of the year, but the bigger story was YouTube’s move to offer its services in two new major languages with the expansion to Russia and Germany. Interestingly, the UK and Ireland both earned a local version of YouTube while Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, three other major English speaking countries, were relegated to the default US site. The only major market that missed out in Europe was the German speaking audience, with Germany – the continent’s biggest consumer market – ignored completely in this early expansion. YouTube offered most of the largest European markets, plus Brazil and Japan, their own local sites. How was the choice of the roll-out countries made? A combination of potential market size and language. In June 2007 YouTube launched its first local sites. After all, if you could search Google on a local search engine and access Google services in your own language, why shouldn’t a local version of YouTube be offered? Mid-2007: The Early Roll-Out While YouTube quickly concluded that their product would have worldwide appeal, they didn’t make the jump to localized platforms before figuring out how to monetize their platform.Īfter the purchase of the site by Google in late 2006, however, local versions of YouTube were never going to be far away. Though accessible from (almost) anywhere in the world, the site was primarily focused on the United States and English language video. In the beginning there was …and that was it. In this post we track the decade long expansion of the company into local markets, and speculate where the company will turn next in diversifying its offer for local markets. This brings YouTube’s total number of local versions of its site to 85, with even more language options on top of that, too! The American company now offers a country-specific experience to users in Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Recently YouTube announced an expansion of its localization program to a new swathe of countries. Is it any wonder that the video sharing site continues to reign supreme in this competitive domain? With everything from YouTube Australia to YouTube Zimbabwe, the company has tailored its offers by language, culture, and taste to audiences around the globe. In the ten years since its launch in 2005 YouTube has expanded from a single video portal – – to dozens of localized portals. While competitors like Vimeo and Daily Motion and, to a lesser extent, Live Leak, have established their own audiences and fan bases, YouTube remains the place to find, diffuse, and earn for online video. When it comes to video viewing and sharing, the Google-owned site is not only playing the game, in large part it is the game.
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