The Indian sites will join Gawker’s new Spanish-language version of Gizmodo — which launched on Monday — as well as local versions of various Gawker sites that have launched in Brazil, Hungary and the United Kingdom. In some cases, as with India, the local sites are run by partners in that country, and consist of translated blog posts from the U.S. site as well as some local content created by those partners.

Gawker’s partner in Brazil — a media entity called F451 — runs native versions of four Gawker sites (Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel and Jalopnik) while the company’s partner in Japan runs just a local version of Gizmodo. And in Hungary, the Gawker presence consists of a site called Cink.hu, which isn’t really a copy of any of the blog network’s other sites and is run by Laszlo Szily, who worked for Denton when the Gawker founder was a Financial Times correspondent in Hungary.

Gizmodo’s new Spanish site and the Hungarian site are new variations on the model because they aren’t based on partnerships with local operators like the Times of India — they are both owned and operated by the U.S. company, using staff who write in the other language (although both will also run translated versions of Gawker content). Some of the staff at Gizmodo’s new Spanish version are based in New York and others in Spain, a result of Gawker’s recent acquisition of a local Gawker-style site called Guanabee, whose founder now runs Gizmodo en Espanol.

Gawker wants international to be 20 percent of revenue

I asked Denton whether the company is expanding internationally because growth in the U.S. market has slowed and he said no — according to the Gawker CEO, the blog network says it expects to see 40-per-cent growth in 2013, an even faster rate than it saw in 2012, although Denton didn’t say whether that was revenue or some other metric (Update: Denton clarified to me via Twitter that he meant revenues). He also said he wants to take international revenues to 20 percent of Gawker’s sales from the 5-per-cent level they are at currently, and that international deals are much more lucrative for Gawker because the profit margins are higher,.

As for what comes next, Denton said China is the biggest hole in Gawker Media’s portfolio of international properties. The company has been trying to set something up there but hasn’t been able to find the right local partner yet, he said, and therefore it may need to publish Chinese content from somewhere outside the country if it wants to make inroads into that market.

Denton also said that the company’s new Kinja platform has been a big part of the expansion, since it allows Gawker sites to host more active conversations and discussions than the previous version — including discussions that are sponsored by advertisers. Gawker launched the new platform last year, and Denton told me in an interview at the time that the focus on discussions awas going to be a big part of the future of Gawker.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt met French president François Hollande on Monday at the Elysée, which, in a statement, says:

“(Hollande) stressed that dialogue and negotiation between partners seemed, to him, the best way – but, if necessary, a law could intervene on this issue, as with the current project in Germany. The development of the digital economy calls for an adaptation in taxation in order to better understand the value of sharing and funding the creation of content.”

A unified policy from Europe’s two big axes, France and Germany, against Google’s view — that it crawls news stories but publishes only excerpts – could be a big problem for Mountain View.

Eric Schmidt meets France’s president, culture minister and other ministers

In August, Germany’s Bundestag passed Leistungsschutzrecht, a copyright law amendment devised by the country’s coalition government that will give news publishers a year-long exclusive right to publish their material online, requiring others obtain a license to excerpt.

Such legislation is likely devised from a position defending troubled industries, rather than genuinely safeguarding Fair Use-style rights. But that doesn’t mean Google won’t have to deploy its policy arsenal in defense again all the same.

Google wrote to several French ministers earlier this month with a threat of its own — if the levy is implemented, “as a consequence, (we) would be required to no longer reference French sites.” Google warned that France’s proposal would “threaten its very existence” and harm the content market, AFP reported.

Eric Schmidt arrives at the Élysée

This all sounds familiar…

Google’s most notable European news worries came in Belgium, where in 2007 a court ruled that Google did not have the right to run story excerpts from members of the Copiepresse trade group. Google duly pulled the newspaper sites’ out of Google News — ironically, much to their chagrin. Later, they struck an agreement — undetailed — through which Google restored the content in mid-2011.

Now the issue looks like re-opening again…

• France: Hollande is in a good position to make headway, emboldened both by the European Commission’s competition scrutiny of Google’s indexing algorithm and by its French-led inquiry that has ordered Google to re-separate its recently united privacy policies.
• Germany: The extent to which Google is really encapsulated by Leistungsschutzrecht is not fully clear, but a test could be on the horizon.
• Brazil: 154 newspapers comprising 90 percent of the market are withholding their content from Google News, and say they have barely lost any traffic.

Not everyone takes the same stance. UK newspapers, supported by the country’s copyright court, also now require commercial aggregators pay a license for re-use, but their definition of “commercial” encompasses only paid clipping services, not free services like Google News. That means Google can limbo under the law by choosing not to commercialize its service.

That is not necessarily a productive situation. Together with its stock defense (“we drive four billion clicks to news publishers”), this “we don’t profit from your content” argument may be one which Google deploys in negotiation. But that won’t necessarily trump the equal refrain from many a worried publisher: “Neither do we!”

But, although the service sees no problem heading to emerging young markets, high costs will keep it out of Germany for the foreseeable future.

“We’re about to launch in France, Spain and Italy,” international VP Nic Jones told Informa Telecom & Media’s Industry Outlook 2013 conference on Tuesday.

“The one missing country is Germany. Germany is very, very hard to gain digital rights to be able to build a digital business.”

License rates required of digital services by royalty collectors are still relatively high in the country.

“They (rightsholders) genuinely believe they are protecting the music industry,” Jones said. “They need to embrace the future without being so scared of it.”

Jointly owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media Company, Vevo has so far launched in six countries, including Brazil. Whilst that choice might raise some eyebrows, the territory is growing up fast.

Jones said Vevo aims to launch in countries where people are most passionate about live music: “Actually, there is a market to monetize premium videos in Brazil – and Mexico, too.”

Such expansion will see mobile become Vevo’s primary distribution device.

“UK growth is far greater than on mobile than anything else,” Jones said. “Asia s a bit down the track for us. But we don’t see Vevo as a desktop proposition

“We are talking with various potential partners in India, where Indians many will only ever see the internet as a mobile proposition.

“Eastern Europe is going to be a high priority for us next year- places like Russia are incredibly important.”

But, as mobile becomes the majority, free content operators are posed with a challenge – advertising models are playing catch-up.

“Monetising mobile is much more hard,” Vevo VP Jones told Informa Telecoms & Media’s conference.

“The formats aren’t clear yet. The idea from agencies that mobile should be treated separately is a mistake. There is a view that mobile should be sold at a lower CPM. Most advertisers buying VOD are thinking about the laptop or the PC.

“There is a very big job to educate the advertisers and agencies. Not to educate the users – they are naturally emanating toward mobile.”

The challenge of emerging markets being mobile-first is one recognised by others like Facebook, which conceded in its IPO filing that it is increasingly well used in developing countries on handsets, where its business model is virginal.

But what Jones was also speaking to was a growing grumble I am hearing, from content services, that – even in the west – mobile advertising effectiveness just isn’t yet cutting it.

Jones speculated that Vevo may float on the market “one day”. And he said, in future, it would innovate around presenting live music gigs. He cited an example of a Led Zepplin concert which attracted two million applications for 20,000 tickets as proving there is a ready audience of people to pay for online gig streams.

The next country in which tension has erupted is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

All 154 members of the Association of Newspapers in Brazil (ANJ), comprising 90 percent of  the country’s newspaper circulation, recently opted out of Google News, claiming the search firm should pay them to re-run their headlines and excerpts.

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reports the issue provoked disagreement between a Google executive and a local newspaper lawyer at this week’s American Press Association General Assembly in Sao Paulo.

We have already seen this issue play out in Belgium, Germany and France, where national newspapers associations have reported Google to courts and to regulators for republishing their headlines.

But Brazil is a new ball game, with an increasingly affluent, increasingly digital middle class ready to grow the country from an “emerging market” in to a real market. If Google cannot get publishers on board, it may be missing out on some of the Latin America boom opportunity.

At the General Assembly, Google reeled out the same stock defence it has used in all related cases elsewhere – it sends four billion clicks to news sites each month (via Estadao).

But, with intransigence like that on display from the publishers there, chances aren’t good. “By providing the first few lines of our stories to internet users, (Google) reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites,” ANJ president Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto told Knight Center - the direct opposite logic to that which Google brandishes.

• The New York Times says it will launch a Portuguese-language edition of its website in 2013, containing translations of its English articles and original local material – all in all, 30 to 40 articles per day.
• This comes two weeks after the Financial Times said it, too, will launch a Latin American edition in print as well as web and mobile app.

Each of the titles already has several national editions around the world. The FT has operated FTChinese.com since 2005, whilst NYT launched cn.nytimes.com in beta this June, due to launch fully in November.

Mashable: “Unlike the U.S. edition, which introduced a metered paywall plan in March 2011, readers of the Chinese and Portuguese editions do not need a digital subscription for full web access, a Times spokesperson told Mashable.”

Often, when analogue companies go global it is with digital products – for example, Netflix and Lovefilm are taking streaming but not DVDs to new territories. But emerging markets are still experiencing analogue growth.

Newspaper circulation grew 3.3 percent last year in Latin America, at a time when it shrunk by 4.3 percent in the United States and 3.4 percent in Europe, according to the World Association of Newspapers.

In the next few years, Brazil will host the Summer Olympics and soccer World Cup.

So the Financial Times is opening a new “digital newspaper print site” in São Paulo, Brazil – something CEO John Ridding said “underscores our belief in a healthy future for print”.

What we are about to see, in the FT‘s case, is a patchwork strategy of low-cost print-and-digital launches in emerging markets alongside eventual tactical retreat of print in large western cities, as the publisher approaches a print-to-digital tipping point there.

In NYT‘s case, it is telling that, whilst NYT Co. already operates International Herald Tribune as its international edition, new launches are coming under the “New York Times” banner.

Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reports that Livraria Cultura will sell the e-readers for lower prices than imported Kindles. Amazon has not officially launched in Brazil but is expected to do so by the end of this year.

Livraria Cultura, which has 14 stores in Brazil, already sells 330,000 ebooks through its website; following the partnership with Kobo, it will sell 3 million. Only 15,000 of the ebooks are in Portuguese.

Ebook sales makes up less than 1 percent of overall book sales in Brazil, but the country is believed to have huge potential for digital reading. Bowker recently found that 18 million Brazilian adults with Internet access have read an ebook.

Photo courtesy of Flickr / gaby bra

Twenty-four percent of Indian adults with Internet access have bought an e-book, Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher said in a panel at the Publishers Launch BEA conference today, and 18 percent of Brazilian adults have done so.

In predicting e-book penetration rates, it’s key not just to look at the “technology-savvy” countries, Gallagher said, but to look at the size of the overall population combined with Internet penetration rate. “Suddenly, India becomes the second largest potential market” after the U.S., he said, followed by Brazil. The UK and Australia have high Internet penetration, but their populations are small.

“The perfect storm”

Gallagher calls e “the perfect storm for publishing in emerging countries.” Here’s why:

• Growth of the middle-class economy, focused on education
• English is the universal language, at least of business. Translated works will be important, Gallagher said, but “where these readers want to go today is not in leisure reading, but primarily focused on business. And they are asking for the content in English.”
• Advancements in the online payment process (we’ve seen it in the prepaid phone card system, for instance)
• No supply chain necessary; affordable tech

Why the e-reading transition in India and Brazil is different

Here’s why the e-reading transition in India and Brazil will look different from the way it has in the U.S. and UK:

• The transition is led by professional/business and academic e-books. 80 percent of Indian e-book buyers have purchased business, professional or academic ebooks and nearly 75 percent of Brazilian e-book buyers have done so. “The education and business genres are key growth opportunities” in the BRIC countries, Gallagher said, compared to “leisure genres” driving the “traditional Anglo markets.”
• E-book buyers most often purchase e-books directly from the publisher. Amazon has a small market share (at least for now).

Most Indians and Brazilians are still reading e-books on PCs and laptops, but as e-readers become more affordable, Gallagher says BRIC countries have the potential to “leap-frog” the U.S. in e-book penetration in the next couple of years.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/gaby_bra

Brazil is home to one of the world’s fastest-growing publishing industries, though e-book sales are nascent — making up less than 1 percent of total book sales. However, the number of digital titles available is growing. Publish News Brazil recently cited a report finding that the number of available e-books has tripled in the past year, to about 11,000 titles.

Writing for blog Ebook Friendly, Stella Dauer reports that Humphrey made the announcement at Kobo parent company Rakuten’s Super Expo in São Paulo:

It is also said that Kobo is arriving here through a partnership with a Brazilian bookstore chain – probably Livraria Cultura or Livraria Saraiva – to sell their devices in physical stores. ‘We are working with Brazilian publishers and closing sales agreements with retailers, as well as a large chain of bookstores to distribute the eBook readers,’ said Humphrey.

Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten acquired Kobo for $315 million last fall. Kobo plans to expand to a dozen countries in 2012, including Japan.

Amazon’s Kindle is reportedly launching in Japan any day now and could be in Brazil by June.

First up, Japan: Kindle could launch there as soon as April, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) reports. Amazon has been been in discussions with Japanese publishers since last year.

Reuters refers to an article published in the Nikkei, which I was not able to access without a subscription. It says the Kindle Touch will be Kindle Japan’s “flagship model” and that Amazon Japan “will team up with NTT DoCoMo Inc. (NYSE: DCM) for wireless downloads of e-books over the mobile phone service provider’s network.”

Amazon already sells physical books at Amazon.co.jp.

Next, Brazil — by June, according to a piece in Brazilian trade publication PublishNews, found via The Digital Reader. Publishing Perspectives reported last month that Amazon had hired a Kindle vendor manager and is beginning negotiations with Brazilian publishers — “initially, only to sell e-books” — this month.

There is currently no Brazilian Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). (Uh, besides the actual rainforest there.) But e-commerce in the country is growing quickly. Brazil’s largest book publishers all offer e-books, though e-books are still estimated to make up less than 1 percent of total book sales.

Last year Amazon launched Kindle stores in Spain, Italy, France and Germany.

Terra Internet’s Fernando Madeira presented these slides and analyses to the Le Web conference.