In the United States and the Western World, the Internet is ubiquitous. Or, at least it seems that way. But, did you know that New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South Korea and Japan all have higher rates of Internet penetration than the U.S.?
That is what an infographic from public relations and research company Edelman tells us about Internet usage in the Asia-Pacific. New Zealand is the most digitally connected country in the Pacific Rim with an 85.4% Internet penetration rate. No wonder our founder, Richard MacManus, hails from there. Check out the rest of the infographic after the jump.
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According to InternetWorldStats.com, the U.S. has Internet penetration of 77.3%, approximately 240 million users. Yet, even with the relatively high Internet penetration and large population, China still blows the U.S. out of the water in terms of pure users. With a 31.6% Internet penetration rate, that means that 420 million of China’s 1.33 billion people are online.
The infographic also shows social network of choice in each country. Twitter is tops in Japan, which is not much of a surprise given its tech-forward tendencies. Renren, which started as a Facebook clone and lives off of social games, is tops in China while Facebook itself dominates a good portion of the south Asian countries.
Some of the cooler trends features to emerge in the Twitter landscape come from Japan. “Tap to follow” started as a partnership between Twitter and Japan’s largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo. Japanese Twitter users can also charge for access to their tweets.
In terms of what users are doing online, Chinese digital denizens mostly watch video (63.4%). New Zealanders read and write a lot of blogs (79.4%) and take part in social networks (81.5%).
It is interesting to note that for all the engineers, founders and tech enthusiasts in the U.S. of Indian descent, the country itself only has a 6.9% Internet penetration rate. Yet, with 1.155 billion people in India, that still equates to 79.7 million people.
The data comes from analytics firm comScore and does not include data from mobile browsing or public Internet locations such as cafes.
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