The state of the Danish web is…troubled

The Danish IAB, FDIM, has released an interesting new report which for the first time really shows a combined overview of how Danes use the internet.

It’s interesting numbers. I’m not going to quote them here but just suffice to say that if you look at it from a Danish language perspective, the worst fears of international dominance seems unfounded. Only a few sites international sites make it to the top 20. And in weird ways thats precisely the problem.

Now why is this a problem? Because the Danish language area is a small one. Creating content for it costs money. Quite a lot actually. And there is only so much that advertising revenue can support. In other words: Some sites may be living on borrowed time, if they were to stand on their own feet, as they completely lack the scalability of creating and repurposing content. They lack the international angle.

At a network group meeting last week in FDIH, we discussed this. And it was the bitching point number one for most media people present at the meeting: How do you deal with the web and this crazy notion of free, when the size of your population doesn’t merit scaling on content costs? This is what’s driving the media people looking at the online P&L’s crazy. Maybe a bit less crazy when the economy is growing like…crazy. But looking towards a recesion the gray hairs may come out again.