How Much Kiwi Traffic Goes Offshore?

It sounds like a question that can be answered easily doesn’t it?  Well apparently it’s not so simple.  The actual amount of time Kiwis spend on Kiwi sites versus overseas sites is a matter for debate.

Recently the Communications and Information Technology Minister David Cunliffe told the audience at an internet advertising conference that 92% of kiwi internet use is to overseas sites.  No one rebutted that “fact” on the day but Josh Borthwick of the IAB addressed it later, stating that local sites accounted for 40% of time spent browsing.

Now I don’t wish to contradict either of these charming gentlemen but I thought I should look into this for clients.  What I found, after a lot of digging, appears to show that about 90% of the data downloaded by consumers comes from overseas while only 50% of business traffic comes from offshore. (source P17.) This puts the total traffic usage at 90% international and 10% domestic.

Why, if the internet is such an accountable media is it difficult to answer this question? Three reasons;

Firstly, there is no single body that measures all of the internet to and from New Zealand. According to a report by InternetNZ, ” even the largest players in the market do not appear to have rigorous or complete analysis of their traffic flows and associated volumes”

Secondly, because of the cost of international bandwith, many New Zealand sites are finding that it’s cheaper to host their content offshore, even when the content is intended for consumption in New Zealand.

Thirdly: what is it you wish to measure?  Is it the number of sites visited by kiwis, or the number of pages they view or the amount of data they download?  Each of these topics would deliver different answers.  Why?  Well partly because of Rich Media.  Consider a person viewing 10 pages on Yellow.co.nz and 10 pages on Youtube.com with a 1mb video on each.  Now try to imagine how much data has been downloaded from Yellow versus YouTube.  We’ve visited 2 sites and viewed 10 pages on each but we’ve downloaded 1000 times more data from Youtube which is based offshore. 

Overall rich media, video downloads, peer to peer downloads and IP telephony services like Skype, account for a huge amount of traffic flows. To add complexity to the matter, it would appear that about 80% of all the data is generated by 20% of the users. 

Perhaps, if you are interested in further researching this topic, you should pop over to Alexa.com and see their list of the top 100 sites visited by New Zealanders. Though it uses different measurement methodologies than Nielsen and ComScore, it paints an interesting picture and tends to support the popularity of overseas sites (including the usual culprits Youtube, Facebook, Bebo and some surprises – the many Chinese sites on the list for example) as well as the main NZ based sites.