Non-US Traffic

[Dani]

As our search engine rankings have climbed, so has the amount of non-US traffic we receive. While we appeal to a worldwide audience, it's really just the US traffic that can be best monetized. Without giving away numbers, I really feel I need to do something drastic, and asap, to increase the percentage of US visitors. Any ideas?

I know Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to specify a geolocation to target traffic to, but we're a worldwide audience, and so it would be silly to be giving up free traffic for no reason.

[efmesch]

Dear Queen Dani,
As a non-US registered visitor of DaniWeb, I feel a bit offended by your desire to prefer your US audience to the rest of the world. True, you are located in the US, but there are computer mavens all around the world who contribute greatly to all facets of your wonderful site. It would be a loss for DaniWeb's universal appeal if we "outsiders" were to be relegated to a posiion of second rate, not so desirable participants.

[mrandrei]

Non-US traffic is still beneficial to a site's popularity. In fact, it's one of the factors why a site gets better ranking. The more traffic you get from all over the world, the better.

[Dani]

Dear Queen Dani,
As a non-US registered visitor of DaniWeb, I feel a bit offended by your desire to prefer your US audience to the rest of the world. True, you are located in the US, but there are computer mavens all around the world who contribute greatly to all facets of your wonderful site. It would be a loss for DaniWeb's universal appeal if we "outsiders" were to be relegated to a posiion of second rate, not so desirable participants.

I think that you misunderstood what I am saying. Of course I value our non-US audience. Your contributions are just as appreciated, and I certainly don't value you as second-class members. In fact, the majority of our moderation team is from outside the US.

However, that being said, strictly from an Internet marketing perspective, DaniWeb is my fulltime job and I earn a living by selling advertising space on the site. However, most advertisers (and nearly all ad agencies here in the US) only want to deal with US traffic (and sometimes UK / Canadian). Therefore, there's a majority of my traffic that consumes the majority of my bandwidth and high server costs, and yet I am unable to monetize at all. The smaller percentage of US traffic needs to be able to pay for everyone, so to speak.

Therefore, I started this thread to ask the question of ... how is it possible to meld the two worlds? I don't want to cut-off non-US visitors as they're equally valuable in terms of the community. But, from a business perspective, ad agencies like to see a majority percentage of the traffic as being US-based (it's all a numbers game). Therefore, the question I'm asking is how do I find a middle ground and how do other website owners handle this situation?