Stina Honkamaa Bergfors and Malte Andreasson, co-founders and CEO and deputy CEO respectively of United Screens, argue that media is becoming more international and that focusing on local means a race to zero.

This summer, Swedish YouTuber Sp4zie held a meet-up in Stockholm. With enough fans coming to create a traffic problem on one of the widest streets in Stockholm, it was considered quite a success. Fans got to meet Sp4zie and were treated with the best burgers in town.

Some weeks later, he did the same in Cologne, Germany – not without some concern. Sure, he had a fairly large German viewership but do Germans actually care enough about an English-speaking Swedish YouTuber? The result was spectacular. So many fans showed up that the venue’s owners had to call in security to make sure no one got hurt.

A few weeks later, a Swedish YouTube food channel had the idea of making some Polish specialities, with a Polish voice-over put together from the internet. The films, with their humorous criticism of conservative Italian cooking and advocacy of Polish cuisine, became instant smash hits – in Poland and Italy, but not in Sweden.

When making online video, you are on a platform with global viewing. And if you’re trying to make a business out of it, you have the added complexity that viewing may be global but the ad market is always local. Language may be a barrier, but it’s a barrier that is surprisingly easy to break through if you want to.

Today, many strategies – in broadcasting as well as in print media – are built on the assumption that local video content will always be more relevant to the local audience. Under pressure from international giants, online as well as traditional, the conclusion has been that focus should be shifted to local material.

Let’s take a TV channel in Finland, for example, simply because the Finnish language is arguably one that to almost all non-Finns is a true barrier. Finland is also a country with a lot of international media activity: the largest TV channel is owned by a Swedish company, Fox owns another and Netflix has made an ambitious launch there.

Overwhelmed by the flood of international content, the TV channel realises that it simply isn’t, not even for Finns, the best platform to serve US TV shows. Netflix and Fox do that just fine. However, what nobody else does as well as the TV channel is create local content. Therefore it decides to focus on that.

And then, because online is treated as an extension to what’s happening in traditional media, the same strategy is implemented in the online operation. If you’re Finnish, go for the Finns.

Safety.

Wrong! Those set on this course – and they are just about any traditional media in any country with a smaller language – have not laid the foundation to their own future. They have, in fact, made the recipe for a future as a provincial curiosity.

Firstly, the foundation of this strategy is quickly eroding. In these closed-language areas, the population naturally likes local content, as do people anywhere in the world, but they’re not placing the imagined priority on it. In fact, when it comes to online, the majority of the viewing consists of non-local content. The Finns in this regard are like the Swedes, Dutch, Danes, Poles or any other small-language group: they will quickly adapt to an international scene. Your audience online is not particularly impressed by the fact that you know the local language and culture, and the younger they get, the less impressed they are.

Secondly, by choosing to go with local content in a local language you have created a barrier to your own expansion – sure, it does keep some competition away, but the main effect is that you have made it impossible for that content to travel outside its local realm. Some 99.8% of the technically reachable audience is left the other side of the barrier you built.

In the long run, the situation created is one where, with mathematical certainty, the audience will shrink. The local strategy fostered an environment in which it will be gradually less interesting for stars and personalities to be present.

So do we seriously mean that a Finnish media company should start going for an international audience? Yes, you have to, and you must do it while still catering for your local audience. It’s the local audience’s references and sharing that will carry you to the world.

If anyone is thinking that a worldwide online video success can’t be built in a place like Finland, we would like to remind them that the world’s two largest online video successes, both with more subscribers than there are people in all the Nordic countries combined, were built in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Los Vilos, Chile.

There’s nothing wrong with those places. But they are very far from Hollywood.