European internet access: New figures

[heini]

"400 Million people daily all making love": The Seeds. But that was another time and another place. Today Nielsen/ Netratings is here to tell us that 429 Million people worldwide have internet access.
The First Quarter 2001 Global Internet Trends report on Internet access and penetration [eratings.com] goes for Europe´s pleasure, and Asia´s pride by the way.
Yes, 41% of the world´s online population is located in the US and Canada, but Asia and Europe catch up fast.
Surveyed countries include on the European side the Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Germany.
Most important findings for Europe:

a) Germany, with an estimated 28 Million and UK with an est. 24 Million dominate the European Internet population, together with Italy and France they make a rough two-third of the total.

b) Scandinavia still leads in percentage of internet access per population. Of the big countries, UK has the highest penetration rate, followed by Germany, which shows fastest growth.

c) Home internet access is European standard. Though with remarkable differences between countries the rough ratio between home internet access and work internet access is around 3/2 - 2/1. Home access is also growing while work acces is rather stable. Bad news for B2B?

d)Online shopping is still not nearly as common as in the US. Some 9% of European adults actually purchased on the web, and a measly 17% searched for product information. Again countries differ remarkably, from Sweden with rates nearly comparable to the US, to Spain, where 3% bought online.

Nielsen / Netratings Hot of the net July [nielsennetratings.com] figures indicate for most European countries a still strong position of local players. Despite Yahoo, AOL, MSN all being in the European top 5, local companies, often offsprings of the European telephon giants manage to stay on top.

More to come in the appropriate country disussions.

[rencke]

Great summary, Heini, and a real eye opener. Only a year ago, the number of Europeans online used to be split 50/50 over access from work and access from home. Now, access from home is much, much higher than from work. This means that people can spend more time online than before and that we shall likely see European e-shopping explode in coming years.

I also noted some all-time highs: Netherlands 56% being the most sensational perhaps.

It is a pity that Nielsen covers only the rich nations in western Europe with their total of 300+ million inhabitants but not the highly populated nations in central and eastern Europe with 500 million. So we still lack really reliable figures for places like Poland (38 mill) and Russia (147). I am really curious about those places. There are local surveys of course, but there is always the question about the method used. Nielsen's is an expensive one, but others might be tempted to cut corners in order to to cut costs.

[henki]

Great finding heini.

I spent my vacation travelling through eastern europe (Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) last month. I was very happy to see the numerous interenet cafes and the huge interest in the net.

The problems for eastern europe are:

1) Telephone connectivity. Even if some countries has deregulated the phone markets, home telephones are not common. It is easier and much cheaper to get a cellular phone, which are very plentiful.

2) Language barriers. People under 30 speak good english, the rest do not, as they where usually taught russian instead. As we have seen from other non english speaking countries, that is a tough barrier as there are few local pages published.

[zeb]

I'm just wondering how people in Europe pay their online shopping? I can see that for example 26% of swedes over 16 years purchase products online. It would be interesting to know how they pay these purchases.
I know that here in Finland the local Visa/Mastercard administrator frequently warns people from using their cc's online and therefore the most common way of paying is with bank cards or cash on delivery.

[heini]

Hello Zeb
While this thread is not exactly on online payment it still is an extremely important topic. The situation in Europe is as with most things different from country to country.
In UK people do not mind at all to get out their credit cards. In Germany it's a small minority. France is inbetween. Don't have any figures for scandinavian countries at hand.
People who don't use credit cards instead pay on delivery or via banking.
So for sites targeting the whole of Europe the implementation of more than one way of payment is a must.
May I also point you to this thread:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum18/313.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Rumbas]

For Denmark we average around 170K credit card transactions pr. month and rising fast. However one telecommuniations company account for approx. one third of these from people buying additional minutes for the cell phones.
The december figures should be an interesting read though.

[Ronan]

Hello

I wanted to know if you had any data on the online penetration of 10-16 year olds in Germany ?
Thanks a lot

Ronan

[heini]

Ronan - tough one. Apart from the general limitations of stats on online usage I don't know of any fresh good source.
What I can offer is this study [aolpresse.de] done for AOL last year: It gives a handful of figures basically saying that about 50% of your targeted group goes online.
I'm sure there's more and better material around - it's a question of digging.