In a post dubbed “Why Asia Should Matter to Marketers” on ClickZ over the weekend, the author shared some impressive stats about Asia, and in particular China, regarding a massive Online and mobile audience that’s growing larger and larger every year.
Up to 43 percent of the world’s Online population will reside in Asia by 2013, according to projections from Forrester Research, and China will account for 17 percent of the global Online population. In mobile, eMarketer forecasts China will have 1.3 billion subscribers and 957 million mobile Web users by 2014. The consultancy projects there will be more people accessing the Web on their cell phones in the country than the entire population of the U.S. in 2010. This is an impressive statistic to say the least.
With such a massive mobile audience, combined with advanced mobile technology and devices that in some respects outweigh what we have in the U.S., mobile marketing in the region should quickly become a force to be reckoned with in the very near future. Mobile marketing in general is said to appeal more to advertisers in China because of the country’s broadband preferences. With a low fixed broadband penetration and a faster growing number of mobile broadband users compared to fixed broadband, mobile marketing could be set to eclipse advertising on more traditional media such as the Internet. Here’s some other interesting digital factoids about Asia
- Internet users in Asia Pacific spent more than 5.6 trillion minutes online in 2009, and bought $7 billion in virtual goods, according to the Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Handbook.
- Nearly half of all search activity (44.1 percent) across the region in September 2009 took place on Google; representing 17 billion searches. (comScore)
- India’s Internet population grew to 71 million, a year-on-year increase of 42 percent in 2009; 51 million of them are active users. (Economic Times)
- Japan has around 21.8 million social network users. Around half of them actively manage their profiles, according to Universal McCann.
- The Philippines has more than 10.6 million Facebook users and is ranked eighth in the world in terms of countries with highest number of using the social networking site, reports Inside Facebook.
