The prototypical linux user

[Pallidus]

I'd like to share this with you:

So I made a couple of linux videos and uploaded them to youtube.

Youtube analytics is a cool way to find out who has been viewing your videos so let's pick 2 videos that each had ~2.000 views:

demographics:

Gender

Male100.0%
Female0.0%

Male, 25-34 years 65%
Male, 35-44 years 20%
Male, 18-24 years 15%



so we have a male 28 year old and now we find out where he is from:

Geography
Views	
Estimated minutes watched
1.
United States	
518
727
2.
Italy	
348
440
3.
Germany	
236
356
4.
France	
129
320
5.
Brazil	
120
236
6.
Poland	
118
219
7.
United Kingdom	
103
185
8.
Russia	
96
194
9.
Spain	
77
188
10.
Canada	
69
125

and that really surprised me:

I was expecting the audience for linux to be mostly emerging markets and developing nations, eastern europe/asia/latin america.

it turns out that 'he' is an american 28 year old.

Across the board from all videos united states always comes up first followed by some european union country (Italy seems to have a very active linux community).


There are simply no hits from China (???) and from African nations they don't ammount to more than a dozen.


this baffles me

why is open source not popular in emerging nations????

[j2723]

Youtube is blocked in China.

I don't think Africans have easy access to internet... at least the ones not living close to larger cities.

Edit: I'd like to add, in China a lot of folk use Internet Cafe's (it's more popular than here in Europe), so if there's Windows preinstalled then they'll just use that. (which most likely is the case, as they go to Internet Cafe's to play MMO/Online games.)

[Pallidus]

ah china blocks youtube that explains a lot

you get hits from places like macao and mongolia but then china is silent I guess those 'unknown region' are the chinese using a proxy or something


I have family in south africa and there are many african countries that are developed and have net access

but still

south africa - 5

and it was a video about ubuntu mind you

[j2723]

Hmm according to Wikipedia, IE is the most used browser in South Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:C...eb_browser.svg

... and according to their import statistics (2011), they import a lot of computers, which probably had Windows pre-installed while they were still in use by developed countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreig...ts_and_exports

[dee.]

Could it be that your video is in English, so people from english speaking countries (and countries with lots of people who understand english) are most likely to view it?

People in developing countries might be more likely to seek out videos in their native language.

[Pallidus]

that would explain it but no.... anyone looking for 'elementary luna' or 'ubuntu 13.04' would see it and language wouldn't play a factor as it plays no role in the video etc...

that and distrowatch's hits, phoronix, /r/linux users make me believe linux is pretty much an american/european endeavour.

[dee.]

linux is pretty much an american/european endeavour.

Well that's not true, I know for a fact linux is huge in eg. Brazil and some African countries.

It's easy to forget on the internet that most of the world does not actually speak english. In south American countries people speak spanish or portuguese, and many don't speak english well or at all, and they most likely want to watch videos in their own language. Then there's the way google by default tries to find you webpages primarily in your own language, unless you specifically disable this behaviour. I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure youtube does the same thing.

Also, there's the consideration of sample size. The fact that your results show a 100% male audience already shows that these results cannot be in any way accurate or representative of the linux community. What about people who use linux but don't care to seek out youtube videos about it (I never have), or don't use reddit (I don't, I frankly don't give a crap about reddit) or don't know about Distrowatch (I do use DW, but even the DW people say that DW statistics aren't in any way representative of actual use statistics).

When there are hundreds of millions of people using linux, taking a biased sample of a couple of thousand isn't going to give any kind of accurate survey of usage statistics. The best you could do, I guess would be take a few of the most popular distros (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, RHEL, etc.), and ask if they have any statistics of the nationality of their users, then add them all up. It still wouldn't get you the whole picture, but it'd get you closer.