Analysis: Europe’s top startup Countries, as depicted by Europe’s tech Media.
TechCrunch Europe, The Next Web Europe and tech.eu are the leading resources when it comes to understanding what’s happening in Europe’s startup scene, and are essentially responsible for telling Europe’s startup story.
But what story are they telling of the Countries that Europe consists of? I analysed every article that has been published by these three in 2014 (up to 5th December) in order to find Europe’s top startup Countries as depicted by Europe’s tech media.
The analysis looked at every story where specific Countries or Startups in those Countries were the main focus of the article. So, for example: Prezi puts on 10M users inside 5 months, hits 40M would count as a Country specific story (in this case Hungary), whereas articles that were not Country specific and were more general to the European startup scene, for example: More ladies in tech, what is Europe doing to change the ratio? were not included.
A scraper was used to pull the headlines, date and URL, however Country tags were not supplied, therefore this was done manually, through checking Crunchbase, the Startups website, the original article and through Google search. This was where the real time consuming work occurred!
Overall, I counted 1309 Country specific stories across TechCrunch, The Next Web and tech.eu in 2014 up until the 5th December.
It should be noted that TechCrunch’s output quanitity is far superior to the other two, accounting for 1039 of these, therefore the analysis results are HEAVILY reliant on TechCrunch, almost to the extent that the above is essentially an analysis of TechCrunch’s coverage. The Next Web ran 98 Country specific stories, while tech.eu ran 172.
However, if you multiply the number of The Next Web’s and tech.eu’s stories to equal TechCrunch’s output, then the top four do actually remain unchanged.
Breakdown of each individual media’s coverage in 2014.
To dilute the effect of stories that were written due to the writers network (e.g. about startups launching or hitting milestones), I filtered out the stories that were specific only to funding being raised, or startups being acquired, in order to see if this painted a clearer picture of what is happening in Europe’s top Startup Countries.
There is an almost endless amount of caveats on an analysis like this, but here are some of the more obvious ones:
Location
Example: TechCrunch’s Editor in Chief, Mike Butcher and the majority of it’s writers are based in the UK, It’s only natural for writers knowledge and network to be particuarly strong in the locations where they are based.
Example: The Next Web was orginally a blog focused on the Dutch startup scene.
Contacts
Example: Location naturally has a knock on effect in terms of their contacts, and the stories that are pitched to them.
Editorial
Example: tech.eu’s editorial stance is to provide as wide a coverage on Europe as possible, so they will deliberating looking to publish an even spread of coverage across Europe’s Countries.
Events
Example: Slush, taking place in Finland is now one of Europe’s main events, and is home to lots of Finnish Startups announcing big news, and with all of the main media present, it’s only natural that Finnish startups get more coverage around this time.
Trips
Example: Robin Wauters, Editor of tech.eu took a trip to Stockholm to check out the startup scene there, and subsequently came back with a lot of material to write about.
PR Agencies
Example: Blonde 2.0 are a well connected agency who have a strong relationship with all three of the media’s and represent clients in Israel, Denmark and Russia, so they would have had an impact on more coverage being given to startups in these locations.
Are you surprised by how much/how little coverage your Country gets by the tech media?
Let me know on Twitter @neilswmurray
I also write features and analysis on Nordic Startups over at The Nordic Web.
A BIG thank you to Daniel Jaatinen Mierzwinski for assisting with the data collection required for this analysis.
