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

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.

By: Marc Poulin

Marc Poulin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:28:58 +0000

Hi JF,
I think that Internet penetration rate is a number that can only increase or remain stable over a few years. The reasons are simple: Infrastructure improvements take time and demographic changes take even longer.

When I look at the numbers, I see that some rates changed dramatically over 9 months, which makes me question of validity of the data. For example, Portugal went from 72.9% down to to 41.8%, Canada went from 84.3% down to 74.9% and Denmark went from 68.6% up to 84.2%.

I would suggest removing the decimals in the data table since they could mislead someone into thinking that the numbers are precise.

P.S. Thank you nonetheless for sharing this data
.