A new study launched by comScore Network has revealed that around 649 million people over the age of 15 used the Internet worldwide in March 2006, totaling 14 percent of the overall global population in this age bracket.

The comScore World Metrix is the first of its kind, providing a factual estimate of international online audience size and behavior based on activity from the world’s largest online behavioral research panel.

According to Peter Daboll, President/CEO of comScore Media Metrix, ten years ago the U.S. represented two-thirds of the world’s online population. Today, they only account for approximately a quarter (152 million), with the major Asian countries such as China, Japan, India and Korea accounting for 25 percent of the world’s online population (168.1 million users).

Top 15 Online Populations by Country, Visitors Aged 15+

Country	Unique Visitors (000)
United States	152,046
China	74,727
Japan	52,100
Germany	31,813
United Kingdom	30,190
South Korea	24,645
France	23,884
Canada	18,996
Italy	16,834
India	16,713
Worldwide Total	694,260

Source: comScore World Metrix, March 2006
*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes and access from mobile phones or PDAs.
Interestingly, the U.S did not rank in the top 15 countries for average hours spent online per visitor during March. Israel ranked first with an average of 57.5 hours followed by Finland with 49.3 and South Korea with 47.2 hours spent on the Internet.

comScore have also released preliminary results of the top 15 global media properties. MSN-Microsoft sites lead the list with nearly 538.6 million users worldwide, followed by Google (495. 8 million users) and Yahoo! (480.2 million users).

Top 15 Global Media Properties, Visitors Aged 15+

Media Property Sites	Unique Visitors (000)
MSN-Microsoft Sites	538,578
Google Sites	495,788
Yahoo! Sites	480,228
eBay	269,690
Time Warner Network	241,525
Amazon Sites	154,640
Wikipedia Sites	131,949
Adobe Sites	115,774
Lycos, Inc	109,394
Worldwide Total	694,260

Source: comScore World Metrix, March 2006
*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes and access from mobile phones or PDAs.
Mr Daboll stated that, “While the “big three” properties remain consistent among worldwide and U.S. audiences, Wikipedia has emerged as a site that continues to increase in popularity, both globally and in the U.S. Wikipedia’s popularity demonstrates the global power of the Web to unite and provide information across countries and languages, but the full extent of its global appeal is only measurable through this new worldwide measurement”.

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