Israelis the world's keenest web surfers

Stuart Corner
Monday, 08 May 2006 12:18

IT Industry - Market

A global Internet survey has found that Israelis, on average, spend more time than the citizens of any other nation surfing the net.
The comScore survey, for March 2006, showed the average Israeli spending 57.5 hours online during the month, nearly twice the global average of 31.3 hours and well above the US which did not rank in the top 15 countries.

Rounding out the top five were Finland (49.3hrs), South Korea(47.2), the Netherlands (43.5) and Taiwan (43.2) – all countries with high broadband penetration. In number 15 position was Venezuela with 35.3 hours.

ComScore released the data to make the launch of the comScore World Metrix, claimed to be the first true estimate of global online audience size and behaviour based on activity from the world's largest online behavioural research panel, claimed to have active representation from countries that comprise 99 percent of the global Internet population.

Launching comScore World Metrix, ComScore said that 694 million people, age 15+, used the Internet worldwide from all locations in March 2006, representing 14 percent of the world's total population within this age group. It claimed that "This number marks the first worldwide universe estimate based on a consistent methodology across all countries."

According to ComScore the major Asian countries, including China, Japan, India and Korea, represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population (168.1 million users) and their number exceeds the total in the US (152 million).

 "Today, the online audience in the US represents less than a quarter of Internet users across the globe, versus ten years ago when it accounted for two-thirds of the global audience," said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. "This is a sea change of enormous proportion."

 comScore also issued what it said was "a sneak preview of the top 15 media properties worldwide" (groups of sites with common ownership ranked by popularity).

MSN-Microsoft topped the list with 538.6 million users, followed by Google (495.8 million) and Yahoo! (480.2 million). However Yahoo! Sites led all global properties in page views with 137.2 billion page views during March, followed by Google (108.7 billion) and MSN-Microsoft (96.2 billion)

 comScore will officially begin releasing World Metrix statistics when it releases data for May data, in June.