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India, China Propel Asia-Pacific Internet Use; Google, Yahoo, Baidu Lead in Search

The Asia-Pacific internet audience (at-home and work locations, users age 15+) increased 14% from April 2007, to 319 million visitors, in April 2008, outpacing the growth of all other worldwide regions, according to comScore findings on the Asia-Pacific market.

Google Sites led the region with 39.1% of all searches conducted online, followed by Yahoo Sites (24%) and Baidu.com (16.7%), the “State of the Global Internet - with a Focus on Asia” report also found.

Internet Audience Growth

The strongest growth in internet audience occurred in India, which surged 27% from April ‘07, to more than 28 million internet users in April ‘08, followed by China which grew 14% to more than 102 million visitors.

Taiwan, Malaysia and New Zealand also achieved double-digit growth. Meanwhile, more developed internet markets such as Japan (3%) and Singapore (4%) experienced modest gains.

Among the recent trends in Asia and other international markets cited in the report:

• Though each of the top 10 global properties is based in the United States, each sources the majority of its audience from outside the US.
• Half of the top 20 properties in the Asia-Pacific region are locally owned entities.
• Although Google Sites and Yahoo Sites combined to capture the majority of search share in the Asia-Pacific region, five of the top 10 search properties are regional engines, including China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN Corporation (Naver.com).
• internet users in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Australia spend the most time online in the region, but still spend less time than the worldwide average.
• While Facebook.com is the leading social networking site worldwide, Friendster.com is the top social networking site in Asia-Pacific.

Asia-Pacific Search Rankings

Though Google and Yahoo together account for some 63% of searches in the Asia-Pacific region, “several strong, local country search engines…also play a significant role in the region,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice-president.

“Most notably, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu.com, accounts for one out of every six searches in Asia-Pacific notwithstanding the fact that its users are primarily from China”:

• Five of the top 10 search properties are local country entities, including China’s Baidu.com (16.7%) and Korea’s NHN Corporation (5.3%), which owns search engine Naver.com.
• Chinese properties Alibaba.com Corporation, Tencent Inc., and Sohu.com Inc., which host internet-search functionality although they are not strictly search engines, rounded out the list of key local players.

More than 82 million Chinese internet users conducted 6.2 billion total searches in April, an average of 75 searches per searcher:

• Japan’s 60 million internet searchers conducted nearly the same number of searches (6.1 billion) as the 82 million Chinese searchers, a result of the heavier search volume per person in Japan (102.6 searches per searcher).
• Korea (104 searches per searcher) and Singapore (101 searches per searcher) also exhibited notably heavy search volume per person.