15 Years of Chinese Internet Usage in 13 Pretty Graphs

This post is now outdated.

See the Jan 2012 edition at http://www.east-west-connect.com/chinese-internet-user-demographics-jan-2012.

Here it is! 15 years of data on Chinese Internet usage, reorganized into a more easily readable format. I think there are some really cool figures here!

• It took about 7 years for the total number of Chinese Internet users to go from 30 to over 300 million, but it took less than half that time for mobile Internet users to do the same.
• China has as many Internet users as the total population of USA, the UK, Canada and Germany combined.

• Gender distribution is approaching the gender distribution of the total Chinese population, which is 48.5% female (CIA). 

• The proportion of users aged 30 and over has been gradually increasing.

• As the Internet becomes more available in China, more and more people with lower education levels are also able to get online.

• Chinese Internet users are expected to spend about 472 billion hours online in 2011.

• As expected, more and more Chinese people are using mobile devices and laptops to access the Internet.

• The proportional popularity of Internet cafes seems to have peaked in 2009.

• Income levels are slowly going up.

• The proportion of users using email dropped sharply between 2005 and 2007, and continues to drop.

• Chinese Internet users are now much more willing to spend and exchange money online.

• Microblogs exploded onto the scene in 2011.
• Instant messaging surpassed email usage in 2008 and never looked back.

• Microblogging is all the rage, with 195 million users by July 2011.
• Search is super popular. Search engine marketing becomes ever more important.
• The number of gamers has been increasing sharply since 2007.

All data for these figures was provided by the Chinese Internet Network Information Center.

I've arranged the data in an Excel file, so if you're looking for this data in another format, or other values computed from the original data, just let me know and I might be able to cook that up for you.

About the author

Tait Lawton is an online marketer focused on the Chinese market. He is the founder of Nanjing Marketing Group, a company that provides Chinese-language Internet marketing services to Western clients. Tait has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from University of Alberta.
 
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