Who Spends the Most Time on the Web? Chinese Claim Victory
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Written By Reprise Media | April 4, 2006 | Share This
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Are Chinese internet users more computer savvy, or do they just like to spend more time in the virtual reality than U.S. users? According to Forbes.com, Chinese internet users spend nearly two billion hours online each week, while U.S. users contribute only 129 million hours per week.
Still, it seems that Americans outnumber their Chinese counterparts. In January 2006, Nielsen NetRatings (whose statistics don’t cover China) reported that the U.S. had 154 million active internet users. On December 31, 2005 the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported that there were only 111 million Internet users in China…unless these numbers are wrong.
How could that be possible, you might ask? Easy. If most of the population in a country as vast as China is not connected by phone lines (as is the case), it makes collecting data a very difficult task. Dr. Charles Zhang, chairman and CEO of Sohu.com (one of most visited sites on the internet today), says that the majority of Chinese youth use mobile phones to connect to the internet rather than land line phones. Right now there are 400 million cell phone users in China, with over 6.1 million of them connecting online. Dr. Zhang conducted internal research which showed that Chinese internet users - including mobile surfers - numbered anywhere from 150 million to 200 million. If Zhang is correct, China is at or above the U.S. in the number of internet users.
Even if Dr. Zhang’s numbers are off and China is behind the U.S. in total internet users, China still definitely wins in another crucial area – time spent online, which is one of the most valued metrics for advertisers. Chinese users average 15.9 hours per week, while U.S. favorite Yahoo! can only get users to stick around for less than one hour per week (216.5 minutes per month according ComScore Media Metrix). According to Forbes, that’s 1.765 billion hours per week online in China, compared with 129 million hours per week online in the U.S.
It is a well known fact that China is already far ahead of the U.S. in mobile technology, and as cell phones become the connection of choice you can expect China to lead the world in mobile-Internet access growth. But as more and more people in the U.S. are utilizing cell phones to access the internet, we must ask: is our own data measuring how much time we spend online correct?
Topics: Technology |