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Comment by merloen | Hacker News Reader

The EU is a $16.5T economy, most of it on the internet, vastly underserved by internet companies compared to the U.S. Even Facebook was English only until 2008. Big business opportunities are being missed there.

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The smorgasbord of languages and cultures makes it harder to target though. But German, French and Spanish markets are big in their own right, especially if you consider you can reach other territories with them as well. (Austria, Switzerland and to some extent eastern Europe with German; Canada and much of connected Africa with French; Phillipines and Latin America with Spanish.)

I have to congratulate you for including Canada in the "Francophonie".

Usually people equate the French speaking world with France,Switzerland and Belgium.

Which is surprising since Canada has almost 7 million French speakers.

you find that people often omit large swathes of Africa and parts of the Caribbean?

that's a bit depressing, given the importance of colonialism in those areas.

You won't find many Spanish speakers among the younger generation in the Philippines, and that's your target market. You'd be better off using English or Taglish for the Philippines.

And most of the most appealing-to-business sub-populations in a lot of these countries read english well enough that an English-language product captures a lot of them.

Please, the EU is made up of individual countries with individual languages with individual histories and cultures. Comparing it to the US is ridiculous.

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