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April 27, 2005
The Linguistic Makeup of Opera Users
Has anyone else noticed that the ones topping the affiliates charts appear to be in some Eastern European language? I'd be more specific, but I'm not sure if it's czech, serbian, polish, russian or whatever. Supposedly the cheaters have been weaned out, there's a column on the right "outing" them and a forum post - which brings me to my question - is the language mix of Opera users about to tip towards that region of the world?
I mean there's probably something to be said about the fact the the bogglers on Opera Blogs are posting in Japanese, Chinese, Greek(?) etc. I'm sure Opera must have internal numbers that differentiate their various language bases - though looking at their forums (fora), you'd presume English is predominant, followed by German and then the rest - I count about 20 auxiliary languages supported in the forum.
I wonder how tech support works, especially for paid non-english users - though I assume they'd have to read some english to go through the buying process unless there are special buying pages tailored to the various language versions of the browser. Maybe they do some creative outsourcing to knowledgable users? Though really, if you're not a n00b, your primary source of support would be the fora anyway.
I don't know how to put this tactfully, but the average personal income of a number of countries is well below that of richer ones, so are these the places where Firefox makes the most inroads, or are there simply plenty of ad-supported Opera users there? I wonder whether Opera will ever practise differential pricing to "third-world" countries, beyond their licensing efforts to education/large organisations.
A lot of the affiliates listed seem to be portals of some kind - though really why the owners would need so many licenses is a bit beyond me.
I'm wondering if the text ads in their non-english ad-supported browsers are as prevalent as in the English, amongst other things. Is the growth of Opera taking on an even more of a geographic bent? Though of course we know about Opera's attempts to woo users in the US, outside its base in Europe. I just wonder if Tetchy's swim to the US is representative of downloads or simply wishful thinking - and that the market is elsewhere. And I wonder if the market grows away from places that can afford licenses to places that use the ads, how that would affect Opera's bottom line. Apparently ads still aren't as lucrative as licenses, though I suppose that would depend on how long the ad supported versions are used for.
Posted by subtitles at April 27, 2005 6:15 AM | Opera Boggling
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