Digital 2022: Language, Culture, and Global Content Habits
Data in our new Digital 2022 Global Overview Report affirms our recent prediction that cross-cultural content will become even more important in 2022.
Indeed, various data points in this year’s report reveal that the world’s internet users continue to seek out and engage with content that transcends cultural borders.
Just before we look at that data though, let’s start with some contradictory data.
Web languages
Data from W3Techs indicates that the “world wide web” may have a cultural diversity problem, with more than 63 percent of the world’s top 10 million websites featuring content in English.
What’s more, the share of sites in English has actually increased since this time last year, up from 60.4 percent in our Digital 2021 report, to 63.6 percent today.
It’s also interesting to note that sites in Russian currently rank second, while sites in Turkish rank third.
Sites using these languages account for a significantly greater share of the total compared to sites in Chinese and Spanish, both of which account for a significantly greater share of the world’s population by total speakers.
These trends may in part be influenced by local digital behaviours, such as how much time people spend using social media compared with broader web browsing, and how much time people spend consuming video content as opposed to text.
For context, it’s worth noting that – on average – people spend just 7.5 percent of total mobile time using a web browser, with App Annie reporting that the remaining 92.5 percent of mobile time is spent using native mobile apps.
However, regardless of what language a website’s text was written in, ongoing advancements in machine translation tech mean that content written in any language is increasingly accessible to people who don’t actually speak that language.
Don’t get me wrong; as a one-time translator myself, I fully recognise the value of professionally translated content.
However, I also acknowledge that machine translation has now reached the stage where many people can make sense of the overall gist of large swathes of web content, even if they don’t understand the language that it was written in.
But just how widespread has the use of machine translation tools become?
Online translation
Data from GWI reveals that nearly 1 in 3 working-age internet users uses online tools to translate text into different languages every week, although that figure is considerably higher in many locations.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the W3Techs data I shared above, people in predominantly English-speaking countries are considerably less likely to translate text content into other languages.
However, Japanese people are the least likely to engage with content written in other languages, with fewer than 1 in 7 internet users in the country (13.7 percent) saying they use online translation tools in an average week.
At the other end of the spectrum, people in Latin America are the most likely to use online translation tools, with almost 6 in 10 internet users aged 16 to 64 in Colombia (57 percent) saying that they’ve done so within the past 7 days.
The same is true of more than half of all working-age internet users in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.
The role these tools play in everyday life is evident in the world’s Google searches too.
Google Trends data reveals that 3 of the world’s top 20 searches in 2021 related to translation, with “translate”, “Google translate”, and “traductor” all making the rankings.
What’s more, if we disregard searches for domain names, “translate” was the second most-Googled “word” in 2021.
Google Trends data shows that only “weather” ranked higher, but with both words having an index value of 47 compared with the top search term, it’s clear that both words have almost equal importance.
However, the impact of cross-cultural content becomes much more apparent once we start to look beyond text-based media.
Netflix content
New data published by Netflix highlights the popularity of ‘international’ content amongst the platform’s 222 million worldwide subscribers.
We already explored the popularity of Korean hit show Squid Game in our October report, but the company has now added more context to the show’s popularity.
In just the first 28 days after its release, Squid Game clocked up more than 1.65 billion hours of total watch time – roughly two and a half times more than Bridegerton, which is Netflix’s second most popular launch to date.
Meanwhile, Season 4 of La Casa De Papel – or Money Heist, as it’s known in the English-speaking world – comes in third in Netflix’s own ranking of its all-time most popular launches.
That means that non-English-language shows account for 2 of the platform’s top 3 all-time launches.
Admittedly, English-language content dominates the rest of Netflix’s all-time top 10, but considering how Western TV networks used to largely ignore “foreign language” content, the popularity of shows like Squid Game, Money Heist, and Lupin all point to just how willing the world’s internet users are to embrace “culturally diverse” content.
But therein lies one of the most interesting consequences of our increasingly connected lives.
As more and more people around the world have access to – and actively consume – content from different parts of the world at the same time, there is a risk that “culture” will start to become more homogeneous.
On the one hand, it’s never been easier to find diversity if you’re willing to look for it, but as people everywhere have more of the same reference points – especially when it comes to “cultural” content like TV shows, movies, and music – we also run the risk that “local” cultures becomes diluted, or at least less distinct.
However, I suspect that the cultural distinctiveness of Squid Game may have been one of its biggest draws (at least for non-Korean audiences), and as a result, I’d encourage marketers everywhere to explore the role that culture – be it global or local – can play in their advertising activities.
If you’d like to dig deeper into the cross-cultural content trend and what it means for marketers, check out my in-depth analysis.
Want to learn more about the state of digital in 2022? Check out our full Digital 2022 Global Overview Report by clicking here.
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