What language do you use on the web? Where are the majority of internet users located? Who are the most connected populations? Which of the computer or the telephone is the essential tool for digital access? These are some of the questions a recent report by We Are Social and Meltwater tries to answer. We present here a synthesis, the original document in English being accessible at the end of the article.
The world population has exceeded 8 billion in November 2022. Just over 57% of the population lives in urban areas. This is less than unique mobile phone users – 68% of the world’s population –, Internet users – 64% – or even social media users – 60%. The growth rate of users of new technologies – between 2% and 3% – is far superior to population growth – 0.8%. The gross number of internet users has doubled since 2013.
These overall results hide large disparities from one country to another. It is well over 90% in North America and Western Europe, and 95% in Northern Europe, but less than a quarter of the population in East Africa. In terms of global population, nearly a quarter of internet users are in East Asia – the continent as a whole accounting for well over half of global users.
However, these figures are misleading when you consider that more than a billion people in South Asia alone, more than on the whole of the African continent, remain off the networks. More than one in two Indians and one in four Chinese do not have a connection.
The mobile phone far ahead of the computer
There is no mechanical link between access to electricity and access to the internet. In Afghanistan, for example, access to electricity is generalized when less than 20% of the population is connected. In some sub-Saharan African countries, on the other hand, there are more people connected than people with access to electricity. Let us again mention the particular case of the North Koreawhere internet access is simply blocked for almost the entire population.
The average time spent on the internet, on the other hand, has been practically stable for ten years – it fluctuates between six and seven hours a day. It is slightly higher in men than in women and tends to decrease with age, in a population ranging from 16 to 64 years old. If among people with Internet access, the use of the telephone is massive all over the world – 92% – that of the computer is much lower – around two thirds – and reveals great disparities, for example between most countries in Europe – often more than three-quarters – and countries in sub-Saharan Africa – one in four Nigerian Internet users, for example.
Worldwide, while internet use by mobile phone accounted for just over a quarter of connections in 2013, it is the majority today. This trend is less marked in most rich countries. The disparities in the speed of connection on mobile telephone are very significant between on the one hand Western countries, the Middle East and South-East Asia – China, South Korea, among the highest in the world – and on the other hand those of sub-Saharan Africa, India or Indonesia.
Five percent of the world’s population without any mobile coverage
A similar observation can be made for fixed connections, with some surprises: the average connection in Greece is slower than in India and the fastest in the world, ahead of China, is in Chile. Thus, in the latter country, if a fixed connection is eight times faster than a mobile connection, it is on the other hand four times easier to surf on your telephone than on a computer in Lebanon.
The fact remains that 30% of people over 18 in the world had no access to the internet, according to figures from the end of 2021 and that if the average price of the stream has dropped considerably in the poorest countries, a share particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, is still faced with the excessively high costs of new technologies. Lastly, for 5% of the world’s population, ie 400 million people, the immediate environment has no mobile coverage. The populations concerned are often poor and rural.
Much has been predicted, feared or desired, depending on the case, of massive and irreversible changes in habits generated by the pandemic. Most of these changes have in fact only been temporary, but there is still a marked increase in online purchases – one in six purchases now worldwide – especially for consumer products. The big beneficiary of this crisis concerns advertising expenditure, which is now three-quarters oriented towards digital.
English dominates the Web
More than half of the sites are in English, with French coming in fourth place after Russian and Spanish with a share of less than 4%. With a slightly higher number of speakers worldwide, Chinese is only present on less than 2% of sites. On a smaller scale, Arabic is also a widely spoken and largely under-represented language on the Web.
All minds are now turned towards creative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, the performance of which is growing at a very rapid rate and raise questions as much about their new applications as about the abuses they can generate. The proliferation of wrong information at work for several years is already experiencing a dazzling acceleration, in particular thanks to the extremely facilitated creation ofmore and more convincing synthetic images.
Just over half of users only say they are concerned about the accuracy of information found on the Web. This proportion is much lower in most European countries, with large disparities however – 70% of Portuguese, but less than a third of Austrians. Globally, this concern is more prevalent among women, with the gap tending to narrow and then reverse with age.