Comments on: Worldwide Top 30 for Internet Penetration Rate in 2010

By: Jean-Francois Belisle

Jean-Francois Belisle — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:00:42 +0000

Well DSL, simply go to my post entitled Worlwide Internet Penetration Rate Part 3

By: DSL

DSL — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:08:05 +0000

Thanks for the data about the usage of internet in different countries but I agree that stat has been changed and I am looking for it..Do you have any current data available or any other source where I can easily get it..I need it for the presentation..Please help!

By: Canada in the Worldwide Top 3 for Internet Penetration Rate — Jean-Francois Belisle, M.Sc.

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:39:54 +0000

[...] The following blog post entitled Top 30 for Internet Penetration Rate in 2010 is an update of both this post and this [...]

By: Worldwide Internet Penetration Rate Part 3 — Jean-Francois Belisle, M.Sc.

Worldwide Internet Penetration Rate Part 3 — Jean-Francois Belisle, M.Sc. — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 03:39:52 +0000

[...] 2011 is officially started and I am back from my Holidays vacations as fresh as the Social Network movie on Rotten Tomatoes (97% of freshness while this post was published). Similarly to last year, I have decided to start the year with an update on the world Top 30 countries with the highest Internet penetration rate for nations with more than a million individuals. Since I like numbers and political geography, here is the new Top 30 using data from The Internet World Stats database compared to the two previous ones of respectively April 2009 (see Canada in the Worlwide Top 3 for Internet Penetration Rate) and January 2010 (see Worlwide Top 30 for Internet Penetration Rate in 2010). [...]

By: Jean-Francois Belisle

Jean-Francois Belisle — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 18:46:59 +0000

Thanks for your interest Josh. Unfortunately, this ranking may be affected by the availability of data. The data have changed since the publishing of this post and the ranking may change too. I noticed that on the Internet World Stats database some data are now from 2009 (i.e. Oceania) while some others are from 2010 (i.e. Europe).

By: josh H

josh H — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:55:39 +0000

Jean-Francois,

I am trying to get back to the base data you have used for your table above. The link provided shows penetration details from 2008 but nothing after that. Can you please confirm that they numbers actually reflect 2010 and not 2 years prior? Or, if there is more data available can you please direct me.

Thank you.

By: Jean-Francois Belisle

Jean-Francois Belisle — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:56:55 +0000

@Bob. Thanks for your interesting comment. Sincerely, I totally agree that growth in Internet penetration rate will start to decline since it is statistically bounded to 100% and most modern are already near saturation. Like you said, I wonder when the 4 billions people left will join the wired world, they are still consider as untapped potential wired members, but for how long? Concerning the Google paradigm, I know in Canada Facebook is #2, Google.ca is #3 and Youtube is #4, but globally what about social networks such as QZone and Orkut?

@Jean-Francois. Thanks for your comment, nice to hear from you. I am also surprised by the low numbers from France, although I agree that France should not appear in the Top 10 list, around 60% seems low for me too. In relation to what you said, in the next few years, countries part of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) should heavily contribute to the worldwide growth and exhibit skyrocket growth. Concerning, the Google vs. China controversy, it is interesting to note that even though Google is controlling our lives in North America, China still don’t give a s**t about it.

By: Jean-Francois Monfette

Jean-Francois Monfette — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:36:46 +0000

These numbers are very interesting, even though there is a huge difference between the two sources. I am a little bit surprised at the low number from France.

Also, I might be slightly off topic, but I noticed that China is not part of this list, because their penetration rate is only 28%. On the other hand, they have 360 million users, which is 130 million more than the US. In the next 10 years, 300 million Chinese people will move from the campaigns to big cities, many of which will become Internet users. If they can raise their rate to 50%, they will probably have more users than all the countries listed in your top 30 combined !
A wise guy could ask : “Are they really connected to the Internet, or just the Chinese Intranet ? ”

Anyway, keep up the good work !

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:30:11 +0000

Cool posting JF. What I find interesting is that (according to the web site that you linked to), there are now a total of 1.5 billion “internet users” in the world. If there are 6 billion people in the world and 1 million are starving, that would mean that there are probably 4 more million to join the wired world. Given their income levels, I would guess that the internet user growth rate will fall. The overall life cycle growth rate of the curve is therefore very interesting.

I wonder what % of the 1.5 billion users use Google! That is an interesting stat. Then, an interesting follow up would be what is the world’s 2nd most popular web site (assuming Google is #1).

By: Jean-Francois Belisle

Jean-Francois Belisle — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:57:59 +0000

Thanks for your comment Marc. I completely agree with your point that this number should generally only stay stable or increase. The drastic changes are generally associated with a change in the data sources and that was one point that I thought was important to share. The change for Portugal is certainly the most important and the strangest, validity of sources could be an issue like you mentioned.

Concerning the decimal issue, I personally think that these numbers tend to be precise and letting the decimal is still crucial to distinguish between countries.

To conclude, I think that the TRUE increase in internet penetration rate for a country will also grow hand-in-hand with an amelioration in terms of data quality.