George C. Dimitriou

As of January 2008, the US accounted for 21% of Internet users worldwide, or 173 million Internet users according to comScore’s “Digital World: State of the Internet” report. This figure does not include users accessing the Internet from public computers or mobile phones.

Asia-Pacific is the region with the largest online population. In 2008, there were 309 million Internet users in the region, which was a 14% increase over 2007.

Europe is the second-largest region, with 233 million Internet users as of January 2008, though that was an increase of only 6.8% over 2007.

The online populations in Latin America and Africa/Middle East are also growing quickly, rising in January 2008 by 16.6% and 20% respectively. However, these two regions represent a small portion of total Internet users, with just 59 and 40 million Internet users respectively.

      Google is the dominant search brand in most countries, including most of Europe and Latin America, with a few significant exceptions — countries where Chinese, Korean, and Russian languages dominate.

• Chinese language search engine Baidu currently ranks #3 in worldwide search market share, behind Google and Yahoo!
• The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users. MySpace and Facebook are in a tight battle for the global leadership position, each attracting more than 100 million visitors per month.
• Online video has become the dominant online entertainment format, led by the global popularity of YouTube with more than 250 million visitors in January.

Overall, comScore says there were 824 million Internet users worldwide in January 2008.