|
In the July Global Internet Index, Nielsen said that whereas in past years, a market would wait until one medium was well established before adopting another medium, the Internet is "leap-frogging" the adoption of the telephone to establish itself on the scene.
"The telephone took upwards of 35 years to penetrate a quarter of the US population, while the Internet only took seven years," Richard Goosey, chief of measurement, science and analytics at Nielsen said. "In some of the newer markets, the telephone is still at surprisingly low levels of penetration."
Goosey cited the example of South Africa, where only 33 percent of the country's households have a fixed telephone line, yet already nearly 14 percent of households have access to the Internet. It is predicted that over the next 12 months a further 11 percent of households in South Africa will have gained access to the Internet.
The ratings showed Argentina to have the highest level of Internet penetration in Latin America, with 19 percent of households having home Internet access. It was also noted in the findings that many people with fixed line telephones are using them in these countries to gain access to the Web.
Currently 426 million people in the world are using the Internet and 165 million of those live in the US, 47 million in Japan, 27 million in Germany, 23 million in the UK and 1.25 million in Ireland.
Nielsen also produced an index of the top 25 global Web properties for July, with Yahoo ranking first with a unique audience of 124 million people. It was followed by MSN, which has a unique audience of 107 million. Also ranking high were AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Lycos Network and Excite. All of these properties were in the same position in the index from June. Google however jumped up two places from the previous month.
Sony's Web property made the biggest jump in the index, rising by four places to gain entry into the top 25.
More information can be found at http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/
|
