Global online populations

See which languages and countries are online.

[angiolo]

You can have a look at this interesting statistic (updated to June 2001):

[glreach.com...]

It's time to have multilingual web sites.

[heini]

Astounding to me is the figures for China and Japan. Just goes to show how eurocentric / US-centric I still appear to be thinking. Nice for me - targeting the german speaking audience - is the high number of german online population :)

[rencke]

Global Reach is putting the world online population at 476 million, which is up 69 million (or 17%) from the figure that Nua presented in November 2000.

It is interesting to see how the English language is losing its previous dominance - now just 45% of the world online population, while European and Asian languages are growing very rapidly. English is expected to drop to 29% by 2003 and in a few more years, it will be down to its share of the world population (8%), further underlining Angiolo's point above about the need for translations in a most dramatic way.

Also hugely interesting is that China is about to overtake Japan as the world's second biggest online population. They are #3 right now, but Global Reach projects 160 million Chinese online for 2003 against 58 for Japan. At this speed, Chinese will probably be the biggest language on the Internet by 2005. Time to learn Mandarin?

[Eric_Jarvis]

Chinese on the web is complicated...there are a range of possible ways of representing the characters and no internationally accepted standard as yet...what you do for China will not work for Taipei or Hong Kong

so...yes...start learning now because it's a lot harder than promoting sites in Russian, Arabic or even Japanese

even with the additional dificulties, and the fact that our site has difficulty getting on to mainland Chinese SEs and directories, Chinese recently overtook Dutch and Danish to become our sixth busiest language...it's growing faster than any other we have