The worldwide internet population will increase from its current level of 565 million to 725 million by the end of 2004, according to a forecast from eMarketer.
The report also asserted that the Asia-Pacific region is set to surpass Europe and North America in terms of number of web users. Nua recently stated that Europe remained the world leader with approximately 32% of the global internet population (see
One-Tenth of The Global Population Now Online, Says Report). However, the new study estimates that 180 million people in Asia-Pacific will be online by the end of this year, compared with 175.7 million Europeans and 167.7 million residents in North America.
Longer term forecasts show that there will be almost 236 million internet users in Asia-Pacific by 2004, compared with 221 million in Europe and 196 million in the US.
Internet penetration in the developing world remains low. eMarketer predicts that there will be 19.3 users in Latin America by the end of 2002, while Africa will have 4.6 million.
