This comprehensive report contains a detailed picture of internet, social media and mobile usage trends around the world, including global overviews, regional analyses and comparisons, and in-depth profiles of 30 of the world’s largest economies, including The USA, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and many more.
You can read our full analysis of these numbers and what they mean for marketers here, but first, here are some of the highlights to whet your appetite.
The global picture
The number of internet users around the world grew by 10 percent in the past year to surpass 3.4 billion users, or 46 percent of the world’s population. Social media use was also up 10 percent, whilst the number of people accessing social media via mobile devices shot up 17 percent.
As a region, the Middle East registered the strongest growth in internet users, up 17 percent year-on-year. At 14 percent annual growth, African also saw impressive growth in internet users, but access across the continent still lags behind the global average (29 percent vs. 46 percent).
APAC is already home to the largest share of the world’s digital users, and all areas of digital across the region registered strong growth again in the past twelve months. Mobile social media use showed particularly strong growth across the region, up 21 percent from its January 2015 figure to surpass the 1 billion active user mark by January 2016.
Internet use around the world
Internet use is not evenly distributed around the world, with many areas still struggling to connect. In particular, the populations of South-Asian countries such as India as still significantly under-represented when it comes to internet use.
Our companion study to this year’s report sets out headline digital data for 232 countries around the world, and this study reveals that many individual nations continue to struggle with single-digital internet penetration.
North Korea, Niger and Chad languish at the bottom of the ranking, in stark contrast to the high levels of internet access enjoyed by the populations of Western Europe.
Internet use around the world is increasingly mobile, with mobile’s share of global web traffic up 21 percent year-on-year. Statistics within our Digital in 2016 report show that more than half of Facebook’s global users are now ‘mobile only’, and broader internet consumption in many parts of the world is now dominated by mobile.
Social media use around the world
Social media users grew by a healthy 10 percent in the past twelve months, whilst mobile social media users registered an impressive 17 percent year-on-year gain.
As with internet access though, social media use is not evenly spread across the globe, and most countries in Central Asia still register single-digit penetration.
Facebook continues to dominate the global social media landscape, but China’s Tencent enjoys something of a monopoly in its domestic market, and that success is spreading to its Asian neighbours. However, with Facebook posting its quarterly results later today, Zuckerberg and team may manage to consolidate their lead once again.
WhatsApp posted the most impressive growth of the top-ranked apps this year – up 50 percent to reach 900 million users – and we fully expect to see the world’s favourite chat app pass the 1 billion users milestone in the next few weeks.
Partly thanks to this strong growth in chat apps, mobile social media use is the stand-out story for us in this year’s report, and with the accelerating growth of mobile messengers, we believe that marketers will need to rethink their approach to social media in 2016 if they want to successfully engage their audiences.
We explore this shift in more detail in this year’s Executive Summary report, and offer our guidance and recommendations for marketers who want to make the most of this rising mobile social opportunity.
Mobile use around the world
Individual country landscapes
Digging deeper
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