Thursday, August 29, 2013

The next billion #Internet users II

#China, #India and #Indonesia are estimated to have 3 billion connections in 2017. Consequently the opportunity to attract people is very much in these countries.

When you look at the Wikipedia statistics, you will find that Chinese and Indonesian Wikipedia are growing 262% and 122% respectively on an annual basis for mobile traffic and 49% and 34% for non-mobile traffic. This does not make them the fastest growers as you would expect from the prediction; the Russian and Arabic Wikipedias are growing faster at this time.

The story for India is more complicated; it is not clear from our statistics what part of the traffic of the English Wikipedia is coming from India. Traffic for the many other Indian languages, mobile and non-mobile, indicate that mobile is really taking off. When you consider the absolute size of the mobile traffic from India however, you have to appreciate that only the latest smartphones have a chance of rendering Indian scripts successfully. It will probably need an intervention from the Indian government to get the latest language technology implemented on existing smartphones.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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