[carmen_sandiego]

I'm pretty sure those hyper-annoying multiple-popup flows that happen on YouTube, Google search, etc. are completely localized.

Yes it adds complexity, but the size of the markets and companies involved means there's a massive leverage effect. If you get 1,000 people landing on your homepage, small changes in conversion don't justify engineering time or complexity, true. If you've got billions of users, engineering cost pales in comparison to the revenue gain from even a marginal improvement in conversion rate, so it gets done.

[shrew]

Very true, for a big company, the time may well be worth it, particularly for the likes of FAANG where they have UK branches of their company.

I suppose my only counter left would be "is the UK market alone worth the complexity?" Having split off from Europe, and in-fighting among ourselves to the point where we may see the UK itself splitting up again in the next decade. Is it really worth adding additional complexity for a comparatively small market when companies could simply target the continent of Europe as a single market, regardless of EU membership, and probably reach a similar audience with a similar conversion rate.

I'm probably being overly cynical and only time will tell, but I just don't feel the UK alone commands the importance to have things its own way, so to me being lumped in with the EU as the lowest common denominator seems inevitable.

[carmen_sandiego]

I think it will just depend whether the UK starts aligning with the US, say, or goes off to have it's own esoteric regulatory environment. In the latter case, yeah, it seems likely some companies will just not bother.

The UK does get advantages from being an Anglophone country though. That's one of the issues with the EU single market: it sounds great in theory--a unified regulatory system that lets you attract customers from the whole EU. In practice though, you start having to consider whether Poland or Lithuania or wherever is worth localizing for.