I only just checked back to discover your lengthy and thoughtful second reply to my original comment!

Good to know 95% of MS customers are anglos. I wouldn’t have thought the majority would be so staggering. Less competition is fine with me;-)

I was thrilled when you recently added support for all the languages without much fuzz. I guess you discovered some technicality that made things much easier than you originally thought.

The magic of software… beautiful! Thank you!

sorry but i was wrong, i just tried to change the google settings about region, inside the same project, now i realize that need create new project and then change google country to have new results

What are the regions that you are using?

@Frank – just wanted to let you know – There’s some more globalization settings on their way… Stay tuned… We just discovered something cool

Brent

Here I am sat scratching my head wishing I could find some data in a country that wasn’t previously on the list. I stumbled onto your blog to take a break and there was your announcement! ta dah.

Excellent work again Brett and the team.

Thanks

I’d agree that it would be a powerful tool to be able to search in all 41 languages supported by Google.

Unfortunately, it’s just not viable for us to do this.

When Chris DeWolfe (CEO of MySpace) mentioned the 9 countries where internet marketing was viable, he wasn’t talking in general…

Instead, he was talking about MySpace’s own core business.

His comment was:

“Our international strategy is different than our competitors. We look at advertising dollars, and 95% of all advertising revenues come form 9 countries… In those countries, we have 30% more unique users than our closest competitor in those 9 countries. So that is really our strategy.”

He wasn’t speaking in general about the viability of marketing outside of those 9 countries – just that the 9 countries accounted for a significant portion of MySpace’s core business revenue – so that’s where they were concentrating their time, resources and energy.

This is identical to Noble Samurai’s strategy for Market Samurai.

Although there’s a LOT of money to be made from internet marketing in Mandarin (Han) Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Portguese, and Spanish, Market Samurai’s customers in general do not speak these languages.

Around 95% of our customers are native English speakers.

The cost of reprogramming Market Samurai so that it’s able to recognize umlauts, essets, Chinese characters, Japanese characters, Spanish accented characters, etc would be substantial.

It might make more sales, but it’s unlikely to recoup the cost of redevelopment and support – so it’s just not commercially viable for us right now.

If we had a more substantial number of non-English speaking users, we could potentially take the risk. It’s something that I would personally love to do. But right now, it’s impossible to afford.

I hope this helps you out.

Brent

Also, I think the huge number of countries and territories supported needs to be put into perspective.

Recently, the CEO of MySpace mentioned that there are only 9 countries in the world where Internet Marketing is a viable business. While he didn’t name them, we can all guess. I suspect at most half of them speak english natively. Supporting those 9 in native tongue would me much, much more relevant than supporting 230 in english only.

No – I wasn’t clear in the post. Market Samurai still gathers English-language data.

Brent