January 18, 2008 | Friday
2008 Year of the Surfer: China to overtake US internet users…India booming too
By Matt Brocklehurst, Head of Marketing in Marketing |News |Online Sales |PPC |Search Engines |Google |Search Research
Before the year is out China will overtake the US in terms of internet users, according to the Chinese government at least. The China Internet Network Information Center reported that the total number of Internet users increased by over 50% to 210 million in 2007. This compares to 137 million in 2006. Techcrunch reports on a WSJ article pointing out that another 5 million users will mean that China overtakes the US.
China is not of course the only Asian country where the Internet and by extension digital marketing is booming.
Jupiter Research report that by 2011, Asia will make up about 42% of the world’s Internet users, 5% more than today.
India, as you’d expect, is a big driver. According to Google’s Eric Schmidt in 2006, India is to become the world’s biggest Internet market in “about five or ten years from now, based on current trends.” Dylan, Latitude CEO, recently keynoted at the India Digital Summit 2008 in New Delhi and some of the stats we unearthed in preparing for this presentation show just how established the Internet is in the sub-continent:
* 46m internet users in India in September 2007, up 40% from September 2006 (32.2 million users)
* E-Commerce is expected to go up 30% this financial year
* 1 billions searches / month in 2006, 40,000 advertisers
* The part of search in overall advertising spend in India increased by 100% in 2007 (from 0.6% in 2006 to 1.3 % in 2007)
* 7m new mobile phones every month
This is all good news for international digital marketers of course. It’s also an indication of the changing global balance of economic strength. These stats can only add weight to the famous Goldman Sachs prediction that the IC, at least, of the BRIC countries may (note: not definitely will) make that top 10 GDP by 2050. The Internet and e-commerce would seem to be an important part in this development.
Comments
There are no comments for this entry yet. Use the form below to add yours.