Canada isn't a strategically important market for web services. A strategically important market is one where if global companies ignore it and a local competitor gets traction, it will be hard to unseat them. There are lots of examples: Mail.ru dominates in Russia, Seznam.cz dominates search in Czech despite Google's efforts. Global companies missed the boat by ignoring those markets until it was too late. However, I can't think of examples where a Canadian web service dominates the market in the face of global competition. I suspect most of the services listed here figure they can wait until the market develops, then swoop in and own it.
May I ask what you mean when you say "until the market develops"?
Some of these services are unavailable due to content licensing concerns (i.e. other parties own the rights to distribute the content within Canada), but absent those types of restrictions I view not offering services to Canadians to be ignoring a significant market (34,000,000 Canadians, 8/10 households connected to the Internet[1]) of people who have similar tastes and preferences to the Americans you already offer services to, relatively speaking.
I'd hope that any company not offering their services to Canadians would have a pretty good explanation as to why they aren't taking advantage of that market.
> "May I ask what you mean when you say "until the market develops"?"
Without speaking for OP, naturally:
One of the biggest issues with web businesses is public acceptance of the new business model: think Netflix, Spotify, or even AirBnb, all are dramatically different ways of doing things that require a non-trivial amount of social change to gain traction. Changing society and the way people perceive/do things is really hard.
Doubly so if there are licensing issues in the way - a la Spotify or Netflix.
In other words, if you're going to have to go all-in and expend an enormous effort for adoption, you don't want to do it in Canada. It's easier for these services to proliferate first in other countries before importing it to Canada where consumers are already chomping at the bit.
See: Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, all of which built up enormous pent-up demand before they even showed up at Canada's doorstep.
> "I'd hope that any company not offering their services to Canadians would have a pretty good explanation as to why they aren't taking advantage of that market."
There's one very good, almost universal reason: Canadians don't spend as much. In fact, per capita, they can spend half of what the average American consumer spends.
The reasons are numerous and not at all negative - lack of access to stupid credit, general cultural aversion to debt-building, lower credit card usage amongst the entire population, high taxation resulting in comparatively low disposal income. These are all things Canadians in general take pride in, but it also makes the market less interesting to businesses.
Do you have a source on that last point? It's very interesting and I don't think I've heard it before despite living in Canada. I'd love to get a deeper look at this.
Canada is a developed market, with ready access to US internet resources. Russia a decade or so did not have a market that was appealing from a tactical point of view to Western companies (ie. lack of access, lack of customer $, lack of legal framework, etc).
Now Russia is a more relevant market, but the home-grown competitors are already embedded. Canadians may be miffed at Google.ca's lack of caring about Canada, but they still use Google.ca, and will use voice when Google lights the service up.
(I use Russia and Google here as illustrative examples)
What I mean is: until you've won in your primary market. Until you've won, your effort is better spent on winning your primary market than expanding to new markets.
Canada might have the second largest land mass in the world, but its population is just about the size of the California. From a Total Addressable Market, that's quite small. Foreign entities, IMHO, are reserved at the idea of investing large sums of money into a social engine of lesser significance.
In and of itself, California is the 8th largest economy in the world. So I don't think having a population the size of California's is actually a downer. And Canada is one of the largest 10 economies in the world. That's not exactly insignificant.
If I operated a business and told the shareholders "Yeah, we've gotta spend some money on lawyers so we're not going to sell to California." I'd be out so fast you'd hear a sonic boom.
I can't speak for other cities, but in Vancouver, there is a large 'go local' movement, even within developers. This is purely anecdotal, but within my circle (all of us live in or close to the lower mainland), if given the option, we would probably choose a local entity as opposed to a foreign company. For example, I registered my domain name with and my site is hosted on a local company. I'm sure with larger sites it is different, because they require a more robust web hosting solutions. But for the regular Joe, I'd imagine they'd go for something similar, a 'word of mouth' type of thing.
My wife and I try to purchase Canadian things mostly and support our local economy.
If you've ever been to Vancouver, you'll know the lower mainland has an unusually high number of Starbucks. Yet in the last year and a half, a few closed down, and cafés such as Caffé Artigiano can still compete with them enough to still be in business in the same area. I don't have the exact numbers, but I know they stay competitive (my old housemate works at one).
As a recently-ex-Vancouverite, my impression is that there is a small go-local movement. Even among CityOfVancouver white young union(hippies,hipsters) who see themselves as educated, it's a minority position, and I strongly suspect that it's even less popular among all other demographies.
Unrelated to my opinion about that, I'm curious what local registrar and hosting provider(s) you trust, and how much of a premium you're happy to pay to get your local-ness.
In some communities, the usedeverywhere.com network dominates. Here in Victoria, it's usedvictoria.com and craigslist is secondary. We also use a local bit torrent site.
I think BufferBox in the most recent YC batch is a perfect example of this. They're making an Amazon Locker that works with everything, Amazon or no. They launched in Toronto, and already pretty much own the market with Canada Post addresses, a partnership with Walmart Canada, and integration with the local public transportation.
Though why not? They speak english. It's a little smaller population wise than California. Why ignore it if there aren't any language or localization issues. One reason to be sure, already mentioned here, are arcane geographic licenses that lock content down on a per country basis. But for other SaaS web apps, go north!
As a Canadian in the US, I sometimes joke "Forget 6 degrees of separation, Canada only has 3 degrees of separation." I joined FB in 2007, but only because EVERYONE i knew back home was on it and asking me why I wasn't on. And I'm like, really? I hardly know anyone on it here (I was long past undergrad at this point).
Quebec, for instance, needs shipments ( of say electronics ) to be in bilingual packaging at least. I have seen that many new products are not released in Quebec alone but rest of the country gets it.
In the short term yes, but not in the long run. The original services are more innovative and takes over the market slowly but steadily.
I don't know if it's just bad, they drive competition and accelerate innovations in that space. Facebook wouldn't had to innovate at all if wasn't for all these local competitors.
