Posted: 07th Mar, 2007 By: MarkJ
comScore Networks has revealed that 747 million people, age 15+, used the Internet worldwide in January 2007, a growth of 10% over the same time last year:
Among the top 15 countries (ranked by penetration), Internet audiences in India, the Russian Federation and China increased the most in 2006, growing 33, 21 and 20 percent, respectively. China now represents the second-largest Internet population in the world, with 86.8 million users, after the U.S., which rose 2 percent year-over-year to 153.4 million users age 15 or older in January 2007.
Canada, Israel, and South Korea Lead the World in Online Engagement
As a measure of engagement, comScore also analyzed the top 10 countries ranked by average hours online per visitor for January 2007. Canada led the list, with the average user spending 39.6 hours (and 41.3 hours/ month among broadband users) online during the month. Rounding out the top 5 were Israel, South Korea, the U.S. and the U.K. all countries with high broadband penetration. In fact, in each of the top 10 countries, the time spent online by users with a broadband connection was substantially greater than the time spent by users with a narrowband connection.
The UK ranked 6th in the world for Internet penetration, growing just 1% over the past 12 months (slowest out of the top 15). Traffic from public computers, such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones/PDAs, was excluded.
Thankfully we came 5th for "
Average Monthly Hours Online per Unique Visitor", with broadband users logging in for 35.6 hours and dialup significantly less on 7.5 (31.2 average).