The next 10 years of web globalization John Yunker Byte Level Research

Let’s go back to 2000

June million Internet users 5.8% of the world population Source: Internet World Stats

About a dozen languages

Just 10 languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish.

In 2000… Any web site that supported at least 10 languages was considered “global” You could reach 95% of all Internet users with 10 languages FIGS languages dominated the web, followed by Japanese Global navigation was an afterthought Companies didn’t look past “.com” Machine translation was a novelty

The last 10 years

From an average of 12 languages to 22 in five years

Chinese now on 8 of 10 global web sites Russian and Brazilian PT also growing fast

From local chaos…

… to global consistency

Country codes go mainstream Source:

Global navigation becomes a priority

Machine translation becomes ubiquitous

The crowd translates 2 languages to 70 languages in just two years

The crowd creates content

June million Internet users 5.8% of the world population Source: Internet World Stats

June billion Internet users 29% of the world population Source: Internet World Stats

The next 10 years

Languages Avg. number of languages hits 40 At least 10 web sites will support more than 70 languages You are here

Emerging languages Afrikaans Albanian Azeri Basque Bengali Catalan Farsi Filipino Gaelic Galician Gujarati Hindi Kannada Kazakh Kiswahili Malayalam Marathi Punjabi Tamil Telugu Urdu Welsh Emerging markets and mobile devices drive most additional languages India alone will account for more than a dozen languages Governments mandate support for certain languages

The rise of HTML5; the decline of Flash

Embedded text is untranslated text

“We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is a pretty serious thing. It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic.” − Dmitry Medvedev, President of Russia A URL in any language

Partial IDN: Full-length IDN: ICANN-approved as of August 2010:

An address in any language Today Tomorrow: ​

Google becomes the multilingual interface for many companies +

June billion Internet users 29% of the world population Source: Internet World Stats

June billion Internet users 50% of the world population Source: My Best Guess

Thank you. John