How come so much of the internet is US centric?

Seriously, why is it that almost every single site I can find seems to be mostly either written for an American audience, written by US contributors or generally assumes the US = the world?

For instance, if I look up information on a certain game or something, every site I come across will either be using American names for things or (if it's not out in the US yet), have very little information on it. And all the major gaming sites seem to be based in the USA and don't write much until something is released there.

And even on user contributed sites... it seems people from other areas don't seem to write as much. I'm on a bunch of wikis, and yet it seems hardly anyone from the UK or Europe or Australia or wherever seems to be contributing as much as those from the US do (meaning that whenever something isn't out in the US yet, nothing gets written about it). Or on forums... I swear most discussion about something only seems to occur when it's either released in the US or affects the country in some way.

Why is everything online so geared towards an American audience? Why does it seem most people on forums tend to be from the US rather than the rest of the modern world? Am I missing something obvious here?

 

What are you missing?

 

Maybe it's just that most of the sites you are visiting are from the US. I can tell you that most of the content created in Spanish (I'm from Mexico so I search and read a few things in Spanish) is very Spain-centered because there's where most of that content is being created.

Maybe it is because people in the US like writing for themselves and they are not thinking their content will be available worldwide.

 

indeed http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/03/07/hosting-locations-2013/

The top 100 web hosting cities

Code:

    Number of websites    City    Country
1    50,598    Houston    United States
2    29,594    Mountain View    United States
3    24,822    Dallas    United States
4    23,210    Scottsdale    United States
5    21,808    San Antonio    United States
6    20,691    Provo    United States
7    14,871    Ashburn    United States
8    13,214    San Francisco    United States
9    13,125    Chicago    United States
10    11,273    Beijing    China
11    10,006    New York    United States
12    9,412    Los Angeles    United States
13    8,170    Lansing    United States
14    7,588    Tokyo    Japan
15    7,538    Montreal    Canada
16    7,380    Culver City    United States
17    7,349    Brea    United States
18    6,605    Osaka    Japan
19    6,296    Atlanta    United States
20    6,063    Amsterdam    The Netherlands

 

Wow it's amazing how many of the top 100 web hosting cities are from the US. But that list may have one problem, it shows where people is hosting their sites not if the site is from that city or not. As I said I'm from Mexico but I have used US based hosting in the past, and there might be thousands doing the same thing even if they are not from the US.

 

You can pretty much set what time your forum, or forums you use will get active in the UK. During the day when most US people are in bed, it quiet for us until later in evening when US start coming online. That is when your forum, or ones you visit get more visits and pick up with posting.

 

It's odd for me to think of "US centric" because I laugh out loud how many web related things I've purchased such as some themes or plugins I've upgraded are from people in the UK or Australia.

I've been on their forums and thought - the Brits and Aussies are really techie smart - producing so many of the things I use on a daily basis for my websites. One fellow moved from Australia to the UK and back to Australia.

So in my case I've never really thought about location except thinking so much comes to me outside of the US.

In fact, my early domains were registered in Australia and the service is excellent.

 

I have often pondered this myself. Part of it is our access to electronics and web enabled devices. Another part is that the Internet started right here as a military project. I wonder if we have a little bit warped perceptions of how u.s. centric the web is because we tend to visit English only web pages and pages that have content that is geared toward our country.

 

Most webpages in the Internet are in English. According to this page at the Wikipedia Languages used on the Internet almost 55% of the websites use English as their content language. The number 2, 3 and 4 languages are Russian, German and Spanish which have a really small percentage of use compared with English with only 6.1%, 5.3% and 4.8% each. Take me as an example, I'm from Mexico but I rarely publish any content in Spanish because I know most of the sites are written in English and most Internet users are expecting to get information written in English.

 

Well that is a good point, bosconian. People like you will publish in English even though it is not their native tongue because the Internet is English centric. It's all about reaching the widest audience possible. So, that probably means that the percentage of sites written in English will keep growing. I wouldn't doubt that English becomes the official world language within a hundred years.

 

Of course, you'd only be seeing the language(s) you use regularly. But as far as English goes, I think US content would be more glaring for someone if their not from the U.S.

I visit websites that are popular in the U.S. because of their ubiquity. But I'm often struck by the amount of content I read that turns out to be Irish, British or Australian in origin. One of the first and most significant times I noticed this was when vBulletin had the red/yellow cards for infractions. I had no idea what that meant. As I started paying closer and closer attention, though, I found out most of the people I had an online interactions with were not from my country. Or even my continent. Yeah, we do dominate. A little. (Can you dominate a little?) But we have a tendency to only dominate things that originated and are actively developed here. So if it seems like we have more of a presence, that's probably why. I don't think, however, that the other English speaking countries have that small a presence. We just have that little head start.

 

Most of the internet's buying traffic is US based. That is probably why the internet is so US-centric.

Besides most products are launched first in the US and then go on to being launched in other parts of the world - that is, if it is not a global launch. In any case the US is one of the biggest sources of traffic for websites around the world. When you look at the analytics for your site, wherever in the world you are located, you will find US traffic as one of the top sources.

 

Very interesting stats, I notice that a lot of the information came from

While probably reasonably accurate, I think it may be missing some information.
For example, for quite some time China cut off a lot of its internet users from the rest of the world.
Although some of its business users bypassed this by using sites based in Hong Hong and Switzerland, a lot of the non business users were cut off from a lot of the international parts of the internet, how many of these Alexa could not count is open to conjecture.

All in all I think it is fairly accurate, but probably not totally representative of the subject.

 

my server is in houston so i guess i make up some of that chart

my latest forum, the gaming forum, there are gamers all over the world. my biggest contributor yet is Mr.Caffiene from the UK though...great guy!