Popularity of Drupal in Europe: Germany and UK Leading the Pack

I have always considered the UK to be something of a leader when it comes to online technologies and web. Sure, we are not in the same league as the US, but we can hold our own internationally with sites and innovations like lastminute.com, Wolfram Alpha and BBC iPlayer. So I was interested to see how the UK compares to it's European brothers and sisters for Drupal. What follows is a very shallow analysis of some web statistics.

Google Insights

The first stop for any investigation is the ever useful Google Insights for Search, a close cousin of Google Trends. Here, you are able to view trends by locations. There is a maximum of five different locations and as this was also a small piece of research into possible expansion into Europe in a couple of years, I limited it to the top 5 by total GDP. I also restricted the search by date, Jan 2007 - Dec 2009; in my reckoning, Drupal began to be taken seriously by large organisations in 2007. My trend criteria looked like this:

There are several different ways to view the results, most interesting are trends over the three year period, averages over the three year period, and activity over the last six months.

Three Year Trends

The first thing to be aware of is what the numbers actually mean. The y-axis reflects the number of searches for a the term 'drupal', relative to the number of Google searches in total for a given location. This subtly alters the meaning of the numbers. For example, take the seasonal dip at the end of December: this does not necessarily mean there are less were less searches 'drupal', only that there were less searches for 'drupal' relative to other searches (e.g. 'turkey', 'snow').

We can observe a number of interesting trends:

• Spain and Italy seem to be the most interested in Drupal in Europe.
• The latter half of 2009 has shown a convergence of interest in Drupal across our EU5
• For almost all the period, France has trailed, with the exception of the period around Drupalcon Paris.
• The UK started in the middle, took a dip in early 2008 and converged with the other EU5 in 2009.

Six Month Trends

The six month graph shows the convergence in more detail. Not much to see here, Germany starts at the top, replaced by the UK in July, France in September, Italy in October and in the final weeks of December Spain takes the lead. The six month averages confirms this convergence:

The average over the six month period is very diplomatic, only France lags slightly behind the other four countries.

Three Year Averages

A similar average taken over the original period gives:

Italy: 75
Spain: 71
United Kingdom: 64
Germany: 63
France: 47

Which is interesting because Italy and Spain are not renowned for burgeoning Drupal communities. But remember, the number is relative to the total number of searches, which leads to...

The Caveat

If the above 1-100 numbers are relative to total searches, then an increase in searches for 'drupal' will push it higher, but also an increase in general searches will push it lower. What might affect this ratio? The demographic of the internet population of the country.

Countries with lower broadband penetration are more likely to have a higher proportion of geekier users (searching for Drupal, Linux and php) than countries with high penetration rates, where the general population will be searching for X-Factor and what not.

According to the OECD, our countries have the following broadband penetration rates:

Germany: 29.3%
France: 29.1%
United Kingdom: 28.9%
Spain: 20.8%
Italy: 19.8%

This is almost the exact inverse of the three year average tables. It would be very difficult to adjust the averages by the broadband penetration factor, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Alexa

Another interesting source of data is Alexa:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/drupal.org

We can see the origin of the visitors to drupal.org, for our EU5 the figures are:

Germany: 7.8%
United Kingdom: 4.3%
Italy: 2.4%
Spain: 1.6%
France: 0.9%

For Acquia.com the stats are:

Germany: 6.7%
United Kingdom: 3.4%
Italy: 1.9%
Spain: 1.3%
France: 0.6%

Conclusions

The six month google insight trends puts our EU5 neck and neck. If we take into account the broadband penetration rates, I think it would be fair to place Germany and the United Kingdom ahead of the rest. The Alexa trends back this up, with UK and German visitors to drupal.org and acquia.com accounting for a much greater share of visitors than other European countries.