It’s easy to think of online as something that has come quite far in its development already. After all, the World Wide Web has been around for 20 odd years now and the Internet for even longer. Many of us have been online in one way or another for almost as long. However, here at Zooma we are fond of saying that only about 2% of the online evolution has occurred thus far and some recent statistics from ComScore reminds us that online is still in an early phase of rapid development.
According to ComScore, the global online population grew 9% in 2011 and even in a developed market such as Europe it grew a hefty 6% (which represents 20 million new online users in Europe last year). The even more developed online market in the Nordics still saw 400,000 new online users during last year according to the research company.
In total, 384 million Europeans spent an average of 30 hours per month online in 2011. The biggest share (by some distance) of total time spent online was spent in social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. According to ComScore, about 1 in every 4 minutes spent online was spent in social networks in 2011. Out of that total time, Facebook got the lion part with about 3 out of every 4 minutes spent in social networks being spent on Facebook (which translates into an impressive 1 out of every 7 total minutes spent online).
However, it’s not all about Facebook. 3 out of the top 6 social networks in Europe are for example Russian; Vkontakte (VK), Odnoklassniki and my.mail.ru. Likewise, the professional network service Xing is much larger than LinkedIn in Germany and Viadeo is larger than LinkedIn in France.
