694 million people, age 15 or higher, used the Internet worldwide from all locations in March 2006, representing 14 percent of the world’s total population within this age group, said a global survey conducted by comScore Networks Inc. The survey called the comScore World Metrix, is a standardised global measurement to estimates audience size and behavior based on activity.
The survey estimates 168.1 million users across Asia countries including China, Japan, India and Korea, representing nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population. The figure is 11 percent larger than the United States, which has 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.”
ComScore, a traffic-measurement firm, said the comScore World Metrix panel has representation from countries that comprise 99 percent of the global Internet population, representing one of the most universal estimate based on a consistent methodology across all countries.
Fig1. Top 15 Online Populations by Country, Among Visitors Age 15+ (March 2006) (Source: comScore World Metrix)
The survey also released the top 15 countries ranked by average hours spent online per visitor for March, and Israel led the list with the average user spending 57.5 hours online during the month. Finland, South Korea, the Netherlands and Taiwan follow the list.
Among comScore’s top 15 media properties MSN- Microsoft Sites topped the list with 538.6 million global users, followed by Google (495.8 million users), and Yahoo! (480.2 million users). eBay, Time Warners Network, Amazon sites and Wikepedia sites rounded out the top rankings.
Yahoo! Sites led all global properties in page views with 137.2 billion page views during March, followed by Google (108.7 billion page views), and MSN- Microsoft Sites (96.2 billion page views).
comScore said it will officially begin releasing World Metrix statistics with the issuance of May data in June.
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