Internet Audience: Global

Global & US Internet Audience
• China believed to have overtaken the United States as largest internet market
• Global internet penetration now stands at 25.6%
• Over half of Europeans (50.1%) are online
• The Netherlands has the highest population penetration of all European countries at 82.9%
Highlights
Global & US Internet Audience
Europe
Internet Usage
There are over 402 million users in Europe as of June 2009, with 308 million in the European Union. According to Internet World Statistics, 50.1% of Europe’s population now have internet access, a rise of 2.1% from June 2009; see Table 1.
The five largest Western European nations (France, Germany, Spain, Russia and the UK) make up over 206 million of these users, with the largest group coming from Germany with 55.2 million; see Table 2.
The UK has the most active online population in Europe, with the highest average number of daily visitors (21.8 million), highest usage days per month (21 per user) and the highest average time spent per month per user (34.4 hours), according to research from comScore.
Over half (55%) of European internet users are now online every day according to figures from the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) released in November.
According to the research, three quarters (75%) are using the internet during their evenings and 51% of Europeans (up 13% from last year) are on the web at the weekends.
Almost half (49%) of broadband users are using wireless, while 73% of European internet users state that they are staying in touch with friends and relatives more because of the internet.
Time spent online has risen amongst the 25-34 year old age group (from 13 hours in 2007 up to 13.9), with 36% now heavy users of the internet, spending an average of 16 hours or more online each week, and almost two thirds (63%) online daily. Almost half (49%) of this age group regularly communicate via social networking sites and more than a quarter (26%) have created personal profiles (+24% since 2007).
In a similar trend to the UK, broadband adoption amongst European silver surfers (55+) is growing at a faster rate than the average European internet user (26% year on year growth compared to 14%), according to the EIAA, with 68% of all European internet users aged 55+ now using broadband as their main point of internet connection. European silver surfers spend an average of 8.8 hours online each week – a growth of 18% since 2004 – and 78% of this time is for personal reasons rather than work.

Global & US Internet Audience
The research also dispels the myth that social networking is the domain of the young, with nearly one in five (18%) silver surfers visiting sites such as MySpace and Bebo at least once a month – not that far behind the younger digital generation (16-34 year old internet users), 28% of whom regularly access social networking sites. In addition, 21% now listen to the radio online, 7% have downloaded TV programmes and films – 40% year on year growth since 2005 – and 7% are enjoying online gaming.
Broadband
Research from Point Topic released in September reveals that global IPTV growth remained strong in the second quarter of 2009 at 11%, reaching 26.9 million subscribers.
Europe continues to lead the IPTV success story, the research firm said, with 13.6 million subscribers, a 51% year on year increase. The second quarter saw 6% growth in Western Europe – with France on the top of the pile with more than seven million subscribers – and 12% in Eastern Europe.
Earlier this year, In-Stat reported that despite the worldwide economic crisis, IPTV would continue to perform strongly – something which appears to be backed up by these Point Topic figures. The research also found that the number of global broadband lines increased by 12.9 million in Q2 2009.
Broadband subscriptions in Europe grew 13% over the past 12 months, reaching 135 million, which included growth of 29% in the Eastern European territories. Europe is the second largest broadband region in the world, holding four of the top 10 country spots.
Mobile
The mobile broadband market will continue its rapid growth during the next five years and generate valuable new revenue streams for mobile network operators, according to a report released in February. The Analysys Mason study states there will be 148 million mobile broadband connections in Europe by 2014, accounting for almost half of all broadband connections in the region. Prepaid subscriptions will account for 59% of mobile broadband connections in 2014, up from 8% in 2008.
Matt Hatton, Principal Analyst and author of the report, said: “Mobile broadband will be the key growth driver in Europe during the next five years. As growth in voice service revenue stagnates, mobile broadband provides operators with an opportunity to tap into a valuable new revenue stream – and they can not afford to miss out.”
Mobile broadband services will generate service revenue of €23 billion in Europe in 2014, compared with €6 billion in 2008, which represents a compound annual growth rate of 46%, the research firm said.
While prepaid users will account for the majority of growth in the number of connections, contract subscribers will continue to contribute most of the service revenue, at 77% in 2014. Analysys Mason estimates that mobile broadband will account for 5.7% of all telecoms service revenue in Europe by the end of the forecast period, up from 1.7% in 2008.
Hatton added: “The key development in the mobile broadband market during the next five years will be the growing proportion of casual users. These subscribers will have different usage profiles from the early adopters and landline-replacement users who have dominated the customer base until now. MNOs need to understand the demands of this subscriber segment to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity presented by mobile broadband.”
Global & US Internet Audience
United States
Internet Usage
There are now 227 million people online in the United States, according to data released by Internet World Statistics. The latest figures, released in June 2009, shows that number accounts for 74.1% of the population.
North America leads the continent in terms of internet penetration, reaching 73.9% of the population. (251.7 million) throughout June 2009. The rest of the Americas lag way behind the North, with South America having just 134 million internet users and Central America with 32 million; see Table 3.
Facebook now accounts for almost 60% of all social networking traffic in the US, according to research released in October by Hitwise. The popular site increased its audience share by a substantial 194% year on year in September, while its competitor MySpace slumped to just 30% of overall social network visits, which is less than half of the 67% share it claimed in 2008.
Facebook also enjoyed audience growth of 3% month on month from August to September 09, compared to MySpace’s 3% drop over the same period. However, the research found that users spend more time on MySpace than on Facebook – an average of 26 minutes a month compared to Facebook’s 23 minutes.
In terms of traffic share, the micro-blogging site Twitter only accounted for 1.8% in September despite an impressive increase in its share of visits, which are up by an incredible 1170% year on year. However, Hitwise’s report doesn’t include access through third-party applications, such as TweetDeck, which are likely to account for a large portion of Twitter users. Tagged received the third largest amount of visits in September, putting it just ahead of Twitter with a 2% share, while myYearbook slipped below Twitter with a 1% share.
Online video viewing continued to reach record levels in September with nearly 26 billion videos being watched by US users, according data from the comScore Video Metrix service. The report found that more than 168 million internet users watched online videos during the one-month period in the US, with Google sites making up more than 40% of all videos viewed.
YouTube accounted for 99% of all Google’s videos, which delivered around 10.5 billion online videos altogether in September. Hulu came in second place after Google with 583 million videos, followed by Fox Interactive Media with 547 million videos viewed. In September, more than 168 million viewers watched an average of 154 videos, with Google sites attracting over 126 million unique viewers (82.7 videos per viewer), followed by Fox Interactive Media with 58 million viewers (9.4 videos per viewer) and Yahoo! Sites with 57 million viewers (7.5 videos per viewer).
Overall, 84.8% of all US internet users watched online videos during September. The average online viewer watched around 9.8 hours of video content and the duration of the average online video was 3.8 minutes. Around 125.5 million viewers watched an incredible 10.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (82.4 videos per viewer), while 45.6 million viewers watched 424 million videos on MySpace.com (9.3 videos per viewer).
Research from Nielsen Online from September 08- September 09 shows that age does dicate the nature of online destinations. In the US older surfers appear to gravitate towards more conventional and functional brands; (see Table 4) while Disney Online is the most popular brand with the youngest average age of 21.6; see Table 5. The top ten websites of youngest average age are mostly entertainment focused, while the most popular websites with the oldest average audience have a more functional quality.

Global & US Internet Audience
Commenting on this trend Communications Director Alex Burmaster states: “Apart from age, there are two very obvious distinctions between brands with the youngest and oldest audiences. Firstly, young-audience brands tend to be about being entertained or making friends whereas older-audience brands are about products and services.
“Secondly, those with the youngest audiences tend to be pure online players – Nickelodeon and Disney have recognisable online offerings – whereas brands with the oldest audiences are dominated by those who have a real-world presence.
“After all, it isn’t surprising that older audiences who haven’t grown up with the internet should gravitate towards brands which they’ve had a familiar ‘bricks and mortar’ relationship with in the past. Their use of the internet also tends to be more functional than younger age groups for whom it is very much about fun.”
Broadband
New figures in August from Leichtman Research Group reveal that net US broadband additions in the second quarter were the fewest of any quarter in the eight years it has been tracking the industry. It found that the nineteen largest cable and telephone providers in the US – representing about 93% of the market – acquired 634,000 net additional high-speed internet subscribers in Q2 09.
The top phone companies added about 385,000 subscribers, representing 61% of the net broadband additions for the quarter versus the top cable companies. Overall, broadband additions in Q2 09 amounted to 71% of those in Q2 08 – with telcos having 178% as many additions as a year ago, and cable 37% as many new customers as a year ago.
The top broadband providers now account for 69.9 million subscribers – with cable companies having 38
T
Source: Nielsen Online, September 2009
Global & US Internet Audience
million broadband subscribers, and telephone companies having about 31.9 million subscribers. Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, said: “The second quarter has proven to be traditionally weak for broadband growth, but with the market becoming more mature, broadband additions further waned in 2Q 09.
“In a reverse of last year’s second quarter, when cable operators got three-quarters of the net broadband additions, Telcos earned over 60% of the broadband net adds in 2Q 09.”
Mobile
US visits to websites from mobile devices were up 34% during the twelve months ending in July, according to data from Nielsen Online. There were 56.9 million mobile web visits in the US in July 2009, up from 42.5 million visits a year previously, said Nielsen.
While men make up the majority of the US mobile web audience at 53% of visits, up 26% year on year, growth among female users was far higher, up 43%. Among 13 to 17 year olds, usage was up 45% year on year, while the over-65 group enjoyed 67% growth.
A forecast released in August predicts that mobile TV will come of age this year, with a worldwide user base of 54 million consumers in 2009. According to the In-Stat report, Analog Mobile TV: The World’s Most Widely Available Option for Mobile TV, by 2013 there will be 300 million users worldwide.
The average mobile TV user watches at least three times a week, with 20% watching on a daily basis, the report said. Two-thirds of mobile TV viewers claim to watch mobile TV for 30 minutes or more on the days they tune in.
A US report on mobile video found that the total number of live TV and video streams increased by 61% from Q4 2008 to Q1 2009. The research, carried out by QuickPlay Media between 1 January and 31 March 2009, also shows that the total number of unique viewers increased by 11% from Q4 2008 to Q1 2009.
However, the average streams per user decreased slightly from 17.4 in Q4 2008 to 15.7 Q1 2009. Looking at downloads, QuickPlay found that the total number increased by 3% quarter on quarter, with average downloads per user up from 6.1 in Q4 2008 to 6.3 in Q1 2009.
Wayne Purboo, president and CEO of QuickPlay Media, said: “What the first quarter shows us is that interest in mobile TV and video remains strong.”
“It is clear that mobile devices are becoming firmly established as a source of high-quality entertainment for consumers on the go,” he added.
Global & US Internet Audience
Global
Internet Usage
According to Internet World Statistics, the number of worldwide internet users had risen to nearly 1.6 billion by March 2009. Globally the internet has a population penetration of 25.6%. Asia, North America & Europe make up the bulk of this, with the number of combined users reaching over 1 billion. This can be seen in Table 6.
Asia has the greatest number of internet users, although this only equates to 19.4% of its population. Within Asia, six countries have an internet penetration of over 60%. Japan makes up nearly one seventh of all Asia’s internet users.
China has the most internet users of any single Asian country at 360 million individuals, or 48.8% of all the internet users in Asia. However with over 1.3 billion people living in China, this equates to just 26.9% of the population. This makes China the largest internet market in the world.
A study from TNS in March 2009 investigating online behaviour has found that global internet users spend one-third of leisure time online. In the UK, people are spending 28% of their leisure time on the internet, and in the US, people are spending 30% of their spare time in online pursuits. The Digital World, Digital Life study also found that globally, the amount of leisure time spent online overall was similar, but several Asian nations, such as China (44%), Korea (40%) and Japan (38%), were leading the way in terms of spare time spent online.
Broadband
Global fixed broadband subscriptions stood at 422 million at the end of 2008, adding nearly 68 million subscriptions in the year and 16 million in the final quarter, according to figures from Informa Telecoms & Media.
Western Europe has seen broadband growth stagnate, said the research firm, as all but five of its 30 countries now exceed a household penetration level of 50% and 20 countries enjoy penetration of over 60%.
China, where broadband subscriptions grew by 21% over 2008 to reach 82 million subscriptions, passed the USA mid-year to become the world’s largest fixed broadband market, though it still has a household penetration level of below 20%. The IPTV total stood at 19.96 million at the end of 2008. Growth was steady but not spectacular, registering net additions of 7.5 million. Informa said that what is significant is the fact that, of the four main multichannel TV platforms, IPTV and digital terrestrial (DTT) are increasing their share of the market and now hold 10% and 3% of the global market, respectively.
Julian Herbert, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said: “It is a fair observation that IPTV has not made the sort of inroads into broadband homes which operators might have expected, but it is wrong to declare that the concept is doomed to fail.
“In markets where the bandwidth is available and the marketing and pricing are attractive, IPTV is attracting big volumes of new customers and helping operators to improve retention rates and increase fixed line

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Global & US Internet Audience
ARPU.” The research was based on a continuous programme of research covering 730 fixed broadband operators in 160 countries and nearly 100 IPTV operators in 50 countries.
A report published by In-Stat in February claimed that not even a global financial meltdown can stop the growth of IPTV. It forecast that despite the worldwide economic crisis, subscribers to telco TV, which includes TV delivered by telecom operators via IP as well as other technologies, will grow more than three-fold by the end of 2012. Towards the end of 2008, Multimedia Research Group forecast that IPTV subscribers would grow from 20.4 million last year to 89.6 million in 2012.
Mobile
Wireless devices will be the primary means of connecting to the internet for most people by 2020, according to a report released in December 2008 by Pew Internet and American Life.
The ‘Future of the Internet III’ survey found that the combination of portability and affordability will be the reason behind the mobile internet’s success in 12 years time. There will be around four billion mobile phones worldwide by the end of this year, around 15% of which are internet-enabled, according the Pew report.
“By 2020, we’ll have standard network connections around the world. Billions of people will have joined the internet who don’t speak English. They won’t think of these things as ‘phones’ either – these devices will be simply lenses on the online world,” said Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, within the report.
A number of industry representatives agree that future mobile phone handsets will function more as a computer than a phone. “By 2020 I don’t think it will be so easy to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop,” said Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “These will blend into a general ‘mobile computing’ category of device.The report found that the trend of handheld computers has already started with handsets like the iPhone and the BlackBerry, though these are still mostly limited to business users.”
The increasing availability of broadband-enabled mobile networks will underpin continued strong growth in mobile phone usage in Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), according to a report published by Juniper Research.
Mobile phone usage in the BRIC markets will grow from 1.21 billion in 2008 to 1.64 billion by 2013, said Juniper. The report also found that revenues from mobile data services will rise from $26 billion in 2008 to $48 billion by 2013, with China accounting for the majority of such revenues.
Total operator-billed voice revenues for the region will peak in 2010 at $117.1 billion and will decline thereafter, with the key change in the next five years being the launch of commercial 3G services, particularly in India and China.
The number of mobile application downloads will approach almost 20 billion per annum by 2014, according to Juniper. The increasing deployment of app stores targeted at mass market handsets, allied to enhancements in storefront interfaces and an ever increasing array of titles appealing to wider demographics have been the main factors driving this market, said Juniper.
The research found that the success of the App Store – which passed 1 billion downloads in April – has led a raft of vendors, OS providers and operators to launch their own app stores, with more poised to launch over the coming months.