Why advertiser are only interested in half of You Tube

More than half the users of sites such as You Tube are considered too poor to be of interest to potential advertisers.

Owen Thomas explores the economics of the global village over at Gawker and says that

The real problem is that it's not worth it for companies to build datacenters close to their overseas users — so they leave them with balky videos and slow-loading photographs. MySpace is even trialing a low-bandwidth version of its profile pages in India.

However according to Owen the real irony is

The same financiers who are balking at paying for third-worlders' bandwidth bills encouraged this international growth. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch famously pushed Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's recently fired CEO, to expand the site to 15 countries a year after buying it. Venture capitalists encouraged startups to grow all over the world, lest overseas copycats get entrenched in their home markets.