According to a comScore Networks study, 747 million people used the Internet in January this year, as against 694 million in March 2006, which is a 7.5% jump. In January 2006, the number of people using Internet was roughly 677 million.
Last year in January, India counted for 15.87 million Internet users, and this January the figure has increased by 33% to about 21.1 million. Though this growth is highest in percentage term among all countries, it has come on a small base, since as part of global usage, India’s share this January is just 2.82%, up from 2.34% a year back.
India’s internet usage, though impressive in Y-o-Y percentage growth, is at a miniscule 2% of country’s population. The reasons may be many, but 2 among them stand out. One, due to multiple languages and lack of sufficient skill, there are just not many content-rich Indian sites. Second, barring major cities, India severely lacks broadband connectivity.
The second one is important since the comScore report has found that countries such as US, UK, Canada, Israel and South Korea that have good amount of broadband penetration, score high on per person usage time, Canada heading the list with 39.6 hours per person per month spent on the Internet.
As if on cue, India’s ministry of communications and information technology has targeted 9 million new broadband connections in the current year. Yet the fact remains that unless there is a quantum jump in quality and quantity of content sites in various Indian languages, chance of rapid increase in Internet usage in the country will remain dim.
To make that possible, the lead has to come from educational institutes, where instead of present emphasis on simply doing ‘projects’ taking figures and printouts from informative sites like Wikipedia, the onus has to be on publishing every original work on the Internet.
For those inclined to know which sites are most visited, comScore’s study reveals that out of world total of 746,934 thousand unique Internet visitors in January 2007, 510,320 thousand had been to Microsoft sites (note the ‘plural’), 502,464 thousand to Google sites, and 467,832 to Yahoo! sites. There is big fall of 44% in viewer numbers after Yahoo!, Time Warner (AOL and others) Network coming 4th, followed by eBay and Wikipedia sites.
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