The Asia-Pacific region's Internet audience is growing faster than all the other regions, with India and China leading the boom, finds comScore.
According to the Internet analyst company's latest statement, the regional Internet audience grew at an average of 14 percent during the first half of the year to hit 319 million users.
India registered the strongest growth at 27 percent with over 28 million users, followed by China at 14 percent growth with over 102 million, said comScore.
Taiwan and Malaysia also clocked double-digit growth at 12 percent for both. ComScore said the more mature, saturated Internet markets of Japan and Singapore were at the bottom of the list, growth wise.
| Internet audience growth by unique visitor numbers: comScore | ||||
| April 2007 | April 2008 | % Change | ||
| Asia-Pacific | 280,418,000 | 318,623,000 | 14 | |
| China | 90,274,000 | 102,848,000 | 14 | |
| Japan | 53,685,000 | 55,260,000 | 3 | |
| India | 22,395,000 | 28,375,000 | 27 | |
| South Korea | 26,323,000 | 25,652,000 | -3 | |
| Australia | 10,048,000 | 10,904,000 | 9 | |
| Taiwan | 9,245,000 | 10,388,000 | 12 | |
| Malaysia | 7,462,000 | 8,327,000 | 12 | |
| Hong Kong | 3,525,000 | 3,718,000 | 5 | |
| Singapore | 2,216,000 | 2,298,000 | 4 | |
| New Zealand | 1,937,000 | 2,161,000 | 12 | |
Additionally, it was found that Internet users in the region spend less time online than the worldwide average, with users in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan spending the most time in the region. Nonetheless, these were still below the worldwide average, said comScore.
On Web domains, comScore said half of the top 20 in the region are locally-owned, noting that five of the top 10 search engines are regionally-based, citing China's Baidu.com and Korea's NHN Corporation's Naver.com.
Google and Yahoo still dominate the majority of the search share in the region, however.
ComScore said Facebook is the leading social networking site worldwide, but said Friendster.com tops the region in that category.
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