Seibertron wrote:High Command wrote:Your statistics are shewed in favour of North America as this is a US based site. I'd be interested to see how that would compare with a Canadian based TF site, and even a UK based one. Also important in considering is that the UK has a much smaller population then the US. That means that the 9% of visiters we make up, more substantial then it sounds.
I don't think the statistics are skewed. Do you go to websites because of the locality of the website or because of the content? The beauty of the Internet is that, for the most part, content is king regardless of location. What do you think would be different on this website if it was based out of the UK?
If you look at a UK based transformers site like thetf.net most of its visitors are from the UK. Simple as that.
A simple google search can be radically altered by clicking Search: pages from the UK instead of Search: the web.
In that way location will change what sites you visit.
A simple example is a search for "seibertron" while selecting pages from the UK. Obviously a different result to searching the entire web.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= ... CcountryGBHigh Command wrote:US population: 301,574,000
UK population: 60,209,500
If we do a crude calculation and say that the US has aproximately 5 times as many people and we scale up the UK percentage we'd get a figure of around 45%. Meaning that by scaling up the UK population 5 times to match the US, we'd have a proportionally higher percentage of visiters to this site (45% as opposed to 9%).
While I understand your logic, it is irrelevant because the numbers are what they are. Of this site's entire traffic that it receives, over 70% of the users are from North America. Transformers are most popular in the U.S. for whatever reason. Or maybe Hasbro is just dropping the ball over in Europe but I would think that if there was a euro to be made overseas that they'd be there doing whatever they cold to make it. The reality is that the product must not be moving or else they'd be selling more of it over there.
All I'm demonstating is that the US eclipses the UK by numbers but not be percentages. By percentages the overall interest is somewhat similer in the two countries, it's the US's larger population which influences the number of people visiting the site.
Less money is to be made in the UK then in the US because of the smaller population, hence hasbro showing less interest in the UK market. I don't see hasbro taking Europe as a whole into accoutn as its different European branches operate with no obvious coorination. Transformers which are shelfwarmers in one country will never be released in another. The dates figures are released also differes between the countries. The Dutch were getting figures often six months ahead of us a few years back.
I find that NEW products do tend to move quite well off the shelves over here. A new wave of figures will sell out quite quickly. The problem is that with the Energon line the same handful of figures would keep being restocked. When the same figures are on the shelves for up to six months at a time and more of the same keep coming, it's not a lack of interest in transformers that's the problem it's that people already own these figures. Luckilly with cybertron this problem of stocking new figures lessened considerably.
Hasbro seemed to have learned from the mistakes made in Energon, in that respect, although with classics they seem to be going back to bad habits, by overstocking the same few figures, not helped by Astrotrain being missing from wave 1.
High Command wrote:Furthermore I'm sure you've noticed but the UK posters here are quite a vocal group. I'd be interested to see a similar pic chart detailing the volume of posts made on the forums by each nationality and see how that compares with the first one.
I've been aware for a long time that the foreigners have made up a very
vocal part of the forum community here. It is not reflective of this site's traffic. The overall site membership is almost identical to the top 10 country list for the geo-locations of Seibertron.com's users. I would fathom that the European community is socially a tighter-knit group of fans because of your close proximity to each other. You don't live 3,000 miles apart like you can here in the States.[/quote]
I mentioned how vocal the foreign posters are, as in the post I was replying to, you mentioned a shift towards having a more US based staff. While the site's traffic/membership shows a low percentage of visitors from Europe, that doesn't necessarily reflect the forum community, who the staff primarily deal with.
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