Why Are Web Analytics Vendors Interested in Sweden and the Other Nordic Countries?
June 29th, 2007 by Lars Johansson
Disclaimer: This is my personal analysis of the situation.
Background to WebTrends’ acquisition of Webcontrol:
- Webcontrol has been a Swedish reseller of WebTrends for years (though it was previously owned by Nocom). It has never sold or supported a web analytics tool from a different vendor.
- Webcontrol was sold by Nocom to Tobias Svensson in January this year. The first step?
- WebTrends opened an office (though merely an address) in Stockholm last autumn.
- Omniture moved into the Nordic region with its acquisition of Instadia. Suddenly it employed two guys in Sweden as well. Omniture’s Scandinavian/Nordic headquarters are in Copenhagen, Denmark. The reason? Instadia had many people there. WebTrends was feeling threatened?
- WebSideStory (now Visual Sciences) has had a presence in Sweden for a few years, though only one guy is employed here.
- Google has an office in Sweden.
- Insight XE and SiteCensus got many customers through having results from their measurements being included on KIA Index (a list that compares the popularity of websites in Sweden).
More reasons for having a presence here:
- Sweden ranks as second in the world for e-readiness (Source: 2007 e-readiness rankings by the Economist Intelligence Unit).
- Scandinavia is home to approximately 25 million people (64 million including the entire Baltic Sea region). Take a look at a map. Stockholm is in the center if you want to spread to the east and west in the Nordic and Baltic regions
- You can fly from one of Stockholm’s five airports to all major cities of northern Europe in less than two hours.
- Venture capital in relation to GNP is higher in Sweden than UK, France and Germany (Source: 2004 Private Equity Survey, Thomson Venture Economics and PricewaterhouseCoopers).
- Two-thirds of all the Fortune 100 companies have chosen to locate their Scandinavian headquarters in Stockholm.
- Stockholm is the best Nordic city to locate a business in (Source: European Cities Monitor 2005).
- Sweden is the most creative country in the world (Source: The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, 2005)
- One of the world’s biggest ICT clusters is in Stockholm.
- Stockholm is the birthplace of wireless technologies like NMT, GSM, EDGE and WCDMA and home to Wireless Valley (Kista). Mobile Internet lives here.
- There are many interesting new businesses in Sweden: Playdo, Polar Rose, JAlbum, MySQL, Humany, Trig, JayCut, Stardoll, TradeDoubler, EPiServer, MindArk, PriceRunner, Pingdom, Testfreaks, Xindesk, Lunarstorm, Rebtel and many more. And that’s just in Sweden.
- QlikTech and Spotfire were founded in Sweden.
- Some web analytics vendors (for instance Vizzit, Admeta and Syntesio) were founded in Sweden. The market for web analytics has, however, been surprisingly underdeveloped.
“Sweden is one of the two or three leading countries in the world when it comes to new technologies. If you’re curious about new trends, just come and take a look at Sweden.”
- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, April 2005
Article (already in 2000): The most wired country in Europe is making heroes of its net entrepreneurs (Guardian)
Still don’t get the reasoning? Go to the Swedish embassy in Second Life and look for clues!
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August 30th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
It may also be the awareness building that the WAA (web analytics association) has been doing in the Nordics. Bryan Eisenberg asked me to co-chair the Nordic branch of the WAA in August of 2005, because we’d been working in this area in this field for nearly 18 months by then, including spreading awareness of the vendors and technologies at events like Search Engine Strategies Stockholm back in 2004. After a slow but steady start as soon as we got Lars on board (the author of this blog) to run the Swedish branch, things started happening here that became a catalyst for many other events across the Nordic region.
You also have to remember that the IAB and KIA indexes have raised awareness of the general measurement issues very prominently, which hasn’t happened in southern Europe.
I don’t think it’s a surprise that the Nordics is well represented and the vendors follow what is happening with interest.