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Internet users top 1 billion barrier

28 January 2009 13:15 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Aynur Veliyeva â€“ APA-Economics. Internet metrics company comScore on Friday reported that the number of worldwide Internet users in December topped 1 billion users, the first time that barrier has been breached.
The key metric in the number of users is that most of them are from Asia, predominantly so: 41 percent, compared to 28 percent in North America and 18 percent in Europe. Although a sizeable percentage of Europe speaks English in some capacity (as does Asia), the numbers indicate that most of the worldâ€™s Internet traffic will most likely be communicated using some non-English language. China, for example, had 179 million users, topping the list of wired countries; the U.S. was second, at 163 million. Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom rounded out the top five.
Given the relatively low percentage of Latin American users, Spanish may play a disproportionately low role in the online world, at least for now. Spain and Mexico ranked 12th and 13th, respectively, in the comScore table, with a combined total of about 3 percent of the worldâ€™s â€™Net population.
The top sites worldwide? About what youâ€™d expect, with Google topping the list with a 77 percent share, or 776.0 million unique users. Microsoft was second, with 64.2 percent of all users, followed by Yahoo (55.8 percent), AOL (27.1 percent) and the Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia, at 27.1 percent.