Written on August 27, 2008 – 12:13 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Russia has the fastest growing Internet population in Europe, research by ComScore shows. The study about the online behavior of European Internet audiences (based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service) learns us that the Russian Internet population has grown with 27 percent past year up to 17.5 million visitors.
The total number of European Internet users grew with 8 percent during the past year to 241.8 million visitors in June 2008. Next to Russia, countries like France (up 21 percent to 31.5 million visitors), Spain (up 15 percent to 16.2 million visitors), and Ireland (up 15 percent to 1.6 million visitors) also see the Internet becoming a more important part of their society.
See all the interesting stats in the press release. Here are some more highlights:
- Internet adoption was highest in the Netherlands, where 82 percent of the country’s total population age 15 and older went online in June.
- U.K. Internet users spent the greatest amount of time online, averaging 28.5 hours per user per month, while German Internet users recorded the most page views, averaging 2,906 pages per visitor.
Oh Russia
I could fill this blog with exciting news from Russia. Whether it concerns search giant Yandex, the iPhone launch, or dodgy oligarchs buying web stocks, the country’s Internet industry never ceases to amaze me.
What makes the country extra interesting, are the contradictions. While Russia has the fastest-growing Internet audience in Europe, it ranked near the bottom in terms of penetration and page views. Two conclusions can be drawn here: Russia still has a long way to go before they’ve bridged the digital divide and the Russian Internet market will become incredibly important when it has reached its full potential.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on August 20, 2008 – 11:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
29 percent of Internet users have purchased something they were pointed to via spam, according to a study by Marshal. Not surprisingly, the most commonly purchased items include Viagra and porn, but also software, and luxury items such as watches, jewelery and clothing - the counterfeit type.
622 visitors of the Marshal site took a poll, which asked ‘What purchases have you made from spam?’. Quite a tendentious question if you’d ask me. ‘Have you made purchases from spam?’, would have been a more balanced question.
Anyway, a similar poll from Forrester Research from 2004 showed that out of 6,000 respondents, 20 percent had made purchases from spam. So the problem is getting worse. A reason for this could be that Internet users have gotten more used to making online purchases. Or that spam has become more sophisticated (in a negative way), like blog spam.
If taken seriously, this study shows that spam is a matter of supply and demand. “The poll highlights an inconvenient truth,” said Marshal’s Vice-President of Products, Bradley Anstis. “Many of us often question ourselves, why is there so much spam? The answer is, enough people are purchasing products from spam to make it a worthwhile and profitable endeavor for spammers.”
Marshal’s Website poll indicates that the number of respondents who admitted to making a purchase through spam have made multiple purchases; on average, more than two different types of purchase per person. This supports the conclusion that those who buy from spam make a habit of it. My guess is that people buy stuff via spam which they wouldn’t dare to buy in public.
So spam turns out to be a rather booming business. No wonder the number of spam emails already make up for 85 percent of all email traffic. Anstis: “There are approximately 250 million people out there who are interested in these kinds of products and have made purchases from spam in the past. That’s equivalent to double the population of Japan mixed in with every other Internet user. As a spammer - how do you reach that market without knowing specifically who these people are and with the bare minimum of expense? Easy, send lots of emails to everyone.”
Written on June 30, 2008 – 4:04 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Colour me unsurprised: the internet has almost double the influence of television in consumer decision-making in the UK, Germany and France, according to the Digital Influence Index (DII), a study of media consumption and online behaviors conducted by Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive.
In all three countries, the internet ranks as the most influential medium among internet users, with index scores of 44% in the UK, 45% in Germany, and 46% in France. That translates into roughly twice the influence of the second-strongest channel, television, and about eight times the influence of traditional printed media.
Consumers in all three countries are more likely to seek others’ opinions, through social media and product-rating sites, for making personal decisions. In contrast, they use company-controlled sources when making transactional decisions on commoditized items, such as utilities or airline tickets.
Other findings: while consumers see the clear benefits of the internet on their lives, they continue to have concerns about internet safety and the trustworthiness of some online information. In the UK, for example, 66% of online consumers say the internet helps them make better decisions, but just 28% trust the information companies provide on the internet.
The research also confirms some clichés: the French are the most engaged in digital communications, with two-thirds of web users owning a webcam and three-fourths using IM. UK consumers are the most likely to have created an online profile site on a social networking page, and Germans are more likely to have used the internet for research.
Fleishman-Hillard, working cooperation with Harris Interactive, interviewed nearly 5,000 internet users in the UK, Germany and France. The survey was designed to measure media-consumption patterns, internet behaviour and attitudes, and online social networking involvement, as well as to assess the internet’s influence on specific decisions.
Via MarketingCharts.
(The chart embedded above is a courtesy of Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive.)
Written on June 10, 2008 – 3:42 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
ComScore recently released data from their online video measurement service, indicating that 23.2 million French Internet users viewed 2.1 billion videos online in January 2008. That number of 23.2 million viewers makes up for 79.5 percent of the total French Internet audience.
So almost 80 percent of the French Internet users watched on average 90 videos in one month. The average video had a duration of four minutes. Please let me get this straight, January is a dark and cold month, Christmas is over and spring is far away, but… 90 videos?! Does French television programs suck that bad?
Although Google has the largest share in the French online video market (28.8 percent), French viewers watched a total of 28 million hours of online video on Dailymotion.com, more than any other site. So we’ve got a classic chicken and the egg story here. What came first? Are the French watching billion of videos online because of the successful video site Dailymotion? Or is Paris-based Dailymotion such a success because French people watch billions of videos?
Written on May 22, 2008 – 10:46 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As an European entrepreneur you might be delighted to find that you’re actually living on a continent with a rather impressive broadband penetration. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that of the fifteen countries with the highest number of broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, twelve are European.
Denmark is the leading country with 35.1 subscriptions, the Netherlands come in second with 34.8 and Iceland is third with 32.2. Remarkable but true, the United States is only number fifteen of the list with 23.3 subscriptions. The number of broadband connections has been growing 187 percent since 2004 in OECD countries to an average of 20 subscriptions. You can look up all the results in this spreadsheet.
Nate Anderson from Ars Technica draws an interesting conclusion from OECD’s broadband data. He’s clearly worried about the lack of a broadband plan in the U.S.. He then identifies that “Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland all have lower population densities and yet are managing to beat us in broadband penetration. Come to think of it, all five of them are also quite cold and dark for long periods of time.” So a good way to improve the broadband density in the U.S., says Anderson, “maybe is as simple as cooling the country and blotting out the sun.”
So while they’re thinking of drastic measures in the U.S., we can rely on the thought that most of our internet users have a fast connection. Always a good thing to know when building a web-based start-up.
Written on January 30, 2008 – 12:29 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
On-line research institute XiTi has published a study about Firefox’ market share in Europe. I think I speak for most web developers, if I say that the more Firefox users, the better. Well, ‘we’ won some more souls:
After a period of stabilization from June to September 2007, Mozilla Firefox’s visit share, for the average of European countries of the XiTi perimeter, is again growing at the end of the year. Thus, over a one year vision, it gains 5 points in order to reach 28% in December 2007.
The growth isn’t spectacular though and in some countries the user rate of Firefox is actually shrinking. In Denmark, Firefox usage falls back with 0.6 percent. In Ukraine this is in 0.3 percent and in the country where The Next Web Blog is based - The Netherlands - it’s 0.1 percent. To make it even worse for me and my fellow Dutch developers, we’re the country with the lowest user rate. It’s only 14.7 percent.
Maybe web developers should move to one of the three leading countries in Firefox share: Finland (45.4%), Slovenia (44.6%) and Poland (42.4%). Or the Internet community should try to create a ‘Spread Firefox‘ revival. It would save us all lots of time:
Taken from: theMaablog: Where Does a Web Developer Spend Their Time
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