The Guardian targets the US Market

Zia Daniell Wigder | October 24, 2007, 10:48 AM

Capitalizing on the US market for foreign content (highlighted in our recent report on US Globaphiles), the Guardian officially launched its new online edition targeted at the growing US audience. The move has been anticipated for some time, with US traffic to the Guardian's site now outpacing traffic from the UK. The Guardian joins the Times Online, which launched a global edition of its site last year to target the audience outside the UK. This topic has been highlighted by several publications over the past few months, most prominently in both The NY Times and BusinessWeek.

Though most of the content on Guardian America is pulled from the UK edition, the new edition has attempted to localize for the US audience by offering a separate section on US election coverage and Americanized versions of key terms (though amusingly, clicking on “Sports” on the US edition simply takes the reader to the UK “Sport” page).

Michael Tomasky, the editor of Guardian America (an American formerly at New York Magazine), defined the new version as follows:

“…Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers…

…Guardian America will, yes, promote the liberal interest. Not with a sledgehammer; one of the most important liberal interests, after all, is in free inquiry, debate, scepticism, even about one's own positions. But I suspect that, among the Americans who like the Guardian, one of the things they like is that the paper expresses its view of the world a bit more openly than American newspapers do.”

While it’s clear the online edition will continue the Guardian’s liberal tradition, what will be interesting to follow is how the online community in the US evolves. According to my colleague Nick Thomas in our London office, the Guardian’s online community tends to be more libertarian than liberal, creating a very different voice than the publication itself. Indeed, a preliminary look through the hundreds of comments on the “Welcome to Guardian America” post already reveals a pretty broad political spectrum.

With growing interest in the US for overseas content, The Guardian is likely to be just one out of a increasing number of publications eyeing the US online audience, as well as the robust and rapidly growing US online ad market.