Last week Common Sense Advisory published its annual update to the total online population (TOP) and world online wallet (WOW) numbers, including the details on 32 new languages. Now they released the top 30 languages on that list to non-members, along with an explanation of the data and benchmarks.  This year’s research identifies the size (2.4 billion people) and economic opportunity (US$45.1 trillion) addressable through 116 digital languages. As always, we base our analysis on conservative and verifiable numbers.

How can global brands use our annual benchmarks? Wait, did you catch that? US$45 trillion is bigger than the entire gross domestic product of the world’s seven largest economies: United States, China, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Brazil. That opportunity is nearly half of the gross world product and one third of the world’s total population. These are the people influenced directly by digital communications and available online to interact with any brand that speaks their language.

Global brands use these numbers to determine what share of the world market for their products and services they address in their go-to-market strategy, global web presence, and omni-channel customer experience. How can you can use these metrics in your marketing plans?

International marketing teams allocate budgets for messaging across a bewildering array of regions and languages. Whether you define a market as a region, country, or language depends on your team’s go-to-market strategy, but whatever the outcome, every budget decision should begin and end with data. The table below shows the raw and benchmark forms of the data given in the download.

2013 WOW Rank	Online Language	TOP	Share of TOP	WOW (US$B)	Share of WOW
1	English	473,066,001	19.671	16,193.63	35.853
2	Japanese	101,228,736	4.209	4,744.99	10.505
3	German	78,956,356	3.283	3,467.93	7.678
4	Spanish	210,286,536	8.744	3,447.13	7.632
5	Chinese Simplified	538,293,912	22.383	3,214.23	7.116

More.

See: Common Sense Advisory

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