Global Marketing News – 11th January 2016
Netflix undergoes massive international expansion
The online TV company Netflix has just embarked on a massive international expansion plan.
It has launched in 130 new countries worldwide, taking the total number of countries it is now active in to over 190.
It now has a presence in every country in the world apart from China, Syria, North Korea and the Crimean peninsula.
Its absence from China is noteworthy due to the fact that China has the world’s largest internet population, meaning that Netflix is missing a huge opportunity in this market. It is allegedly in talks with the Chinese government about if and how it can enter the country.
Speaking at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Netflix’s CEO commented on the company’s huge international expansion, saying: “Right now, you are witnessing the birth of a global TV network”.
Netflix ultimately aims to have a userbase of 450 million subscribers internationally, with 80% from outside the US.
It has a long way to go before it reaches this goal, however, with its current number of subscribers sitting around 74 million.
It hopes that its international expansion will help it to boost its user numbers, and has also announced plans to create original content in French, Portuguese and Italian in the near future.
John Lewis Christmas success driven by online sales
The British department store John Lewis saw strong sales over Christmas, with online shopping being a driving force behind its success.
Online sales accounted for a whopping 40% of all sales over the Christmas period, with the number of sales completed on mobile phones increasing by 31%.
This helped to offset the 3% fall in sales from physical shops. Overall, John Lewis saw its sales over the Christmas period increase by 7%.
The UK has a digital buyer penetration rate of 88.2%, the highest in the world.
In 2015, the B2C British ecommerce market was worth a staggering 123 billion US dollars.
Facebook pursues video advertising revenues
Facebook wants to boost its advertising revenues by attracting video advertisers.
The social network already has a huge number of videos and video viewers on its platform, with over 8 billion video views being recorded on the site every day.
It wants to turn the huge popularity of video into an advertising method it can profit from.
In order to achieve this, it has recently launched new video advertising options including Suggested Videos, Autoplay Video and Photo Slideshow Ad.
There is evidence that online video ads are a better option than TV ads, as research by Neuro-Insight found that people were more likely to buy a product after seeing an ad on social media than after seeing a TV ad.
The sophisticated audience targeting filters offered by social networks could be the reason for this trend.
Facebook is the most popular social network in the world, with around 1.5 billion users from all over the globe.
Iceland, land of fire and data centres?
Computer science academics in Iceland are putting forward the case for more data centres to be built in the country.
They argue that there are strong reasons for big internet companies such as the likes of Google and Facebook to store their data in Iceland, due to benefits provided by the country’s unique geography.
There are two key problems associated with large data centres – the fact they need to be kept cool and the large amounts of energy they consume.
Iceland’s existing data centre has solved both these problems. It has openings in the walls to allow cold air from outside to come in, and uses cheap renewable energy generated by the island’s geothermal and hydroelectric energy sources.
Google Translates names Russia as “Mordor”
And finally, Google Translate generated some rather embarrassing mistranslations earlier this week.
For around 24 hours, for users translating from Ukrainian to Russian, the word “Russia” became “Mordor” – the volcanic, evil area from the Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy.
Furthermore, the word “Russians” became “occupiers”, and “Sergei Lavrov” the Russian Foreign Minister became “sad little horse”.
The mistranslations come at a time of high tension between Russia and Ukraine, after Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea.
Google released a statement saying that the mistranslations were automatically generated and explained that its translation algorithm was “complex” and could make mistakes.
It has since corrected the translations.
Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Elin Box
Latest posts by Elin Box (see all)
- Top 5 social platforms in China in 2024 - August 8, 2024
- Digital marketing in the Middle East and Africa in 2024 - August 1, 2024
- 4 local e-commerce websites that are beating Amazon in 2024 - July 25, 2024
Good news for people that don’t have local Netflix because streaming content online is much more convenient than watching DVDs etc. However, the new regions of Netflix will have a maximum number of 500 unique titles which is very low compared to US Netflix (5000 titles). If you want to get a good value for your money, you can use services like Unotelly and access all regions of Netflix. You get about 1000% more content with a minimum cost.