I recently saw that Poland passed the 50000 mark on the European part of the map, which made it the first European country to do so. Go Poles!

Download day map of Europe as of Sunday June 8th, 2008.png

Download day map of Europe as of Sunday June 8th, 2008.png

Now, it's hard to compare countries, because of the diversity of sizes. Of course the US is leading the way, but they have a population of 300 million people and many of them are connected...

How can we compare countries on a fairer ground? This question has been on my mind for a couple of days, until Ken 'Numerator' Kovash blogged about the community-driven Download Day 2008 Statistics, which has tons of great info.

I wish we could rank countries for the download day by number of connected people. It's not (yet?) possible, but Ehsan Akhgari provides the world with Pledge Rankings by Country Population, which is pretty close to what I want.

I used the data available as of June 9 afternoon (European time), and decided to remove all data points with fewer than 500 pledges, because I (wildly) guess with less than this, the sample is too small and therefore "noise" is too significant[1].

Here are the results:

Rank Country Pledge Count Ratio (%)
4 Slovenia 4666 0,232
6 Estonia 2694 0,206
7 Iceland 622 0,204
10 Poland 68772 0,179
13 Netherlands 22254 0,134
14 Malta 519 0,129
17 Norway 5519 0,119
19 Latvia 2562 0,114
20 Lithuania 3904 0,110
21 Albania 3853 0,106
22 Belgium 1102 0,106
24 Denmark 555 0,101
25 Portugal 10687 0,100
26 Finland 505 0,096
27 Croatia 4315 0,096
30 Singapore 3784 0,082
31 Chile 13231 0,080
32 Spain 31446 0,078
33 Switzerland 5871 0,077
34 Canada 2538 0,076
36 Hungary 7471 0,075
37 France 47378 0,074
38 New Zealand 2964 0,071
39 Ireland 2909 0,070
41 Italy 40367 0,069
42 Sweden 5677 0,063
43 Bulgaria 4417 0,061
45 Austria 4915 0,060
46 Israel 4126 0,058
47 United Kingdom 35268 0,058
48 Uruguay 1921 0,055
49 Greece 5821 0,054
50 Taiwan 11829 0,052

The conclusion is that the small countries are leading the way. Why is that? I had an Eureka moment on Friday while discussing this with a journalist in London. It suddenly came to my mind that smaller countries are more likely to adopt Firefox than Internet Explorer since Microsoft was not interested in addressing the needs of what they considered as too small and not valuable markets. And I think that, to a certain extent, because localization of an application (in this case Windows+IE) has a fixed cost that is unlikely to be recouped on a small population. With our open-source approach, where Mozilla empowers local users, the cost of covering one more locale is limited. This means that our Open-Source nature actually gives us a head-start to cover some territories... while the quality of the product - along with the word of mouth - does the rest!

Notes

[1] I totally suck at statistics, so please correct me if what I write does not make sense.