694 Million People Are Online
That’s probably give or take a few hundred thousand (but who’s counting). This via Son of a Pitch; Comscore reports that “that 694 million people, age 15+, used the Internet worldwide from all locations in March 2006, representing 14 percent of the world’s total population within this age group.” More from the report:
“Notably, comScore World Metrix includes measurement of the major Asian countries, including China, Japan, India and Korea, which represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population (or 168.1 million users), and which, in the aggregate, are 11 percent larger than the U.S. (152 million users).
“Today, the online audience in the U.S. represents less than a quarter of Internet users across the globe, versus ten years ago when it accounted for two-thirds of the global audience,†said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. “This is a sea change of enormous proportion, and comScore is pleased to be able to provide measurement to aid the world’s largest marketers in understanding how the world uses the Internet.â€
This dovetails quite nicely with the report I saw last week from Bloggers Blog that stated “China will have over 60 million bloggers by the end of 2006 and 100 million in 2007. China has 110 million web users so over half of them will have blogs.” Anyone who wants to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace has to think about these numbers and how to market to them.
