Most People on the Internet are Chinese
Everyone knew that it would happen sooner or later — the world’s most populous country now has the most number of people on the ‘net, and only 19% of them even use the Internet. Techcrunch published a summary yesterday of the latest World Internet Usage Statistics findings, in the form of a top 15 list:
Top 15 countries, by Internet population:
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million
Asians dominate the Internet population, as shown by the IWS graph:
Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Only 15.3% of Asians use the Internet, according to the report.
According to Forrester, online retail sales in the USA for 2008 was forecast to be $204 billion. 73.6% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, so there is about $2.77 billion of sales online (per year) per 1% of the population that is online, in North America.
Canadian online sales, despite over 84% Internet penetration, amount to only $12.8 million according to StatsCan, so Canadian stats are rounded off when calculating for North America.
It probably doesn’t translate directly like this, but if we assume that Asian Internet users spend online the same way that U.S. consumers do, there is a potential Asian market of $42.4 billion right now, with wild growth in the coming years. Anyone selling online would be well advised to translate their website into Asian languages!
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