European Internet Population Rockets to 240 Million with Russia Accounting for 17 Million

There is internet outside of the Silicon Valley - and here is another proof. comScore issued another press release about European internet audience and its immense growth over the year since June 2007. The released information includes various figures demonstrating changes in the number of internet users in 16 countries comScore tracks for its World Metrix. comScore only counts users accessing the web from home or office computers aged 15 and higher and excludes traffic from public-access computers and mobile devices.

The total number of European internet users increased by 8% compared to the last year. I personally can’t help but be proud of the fact that I live in the country with the fastest growing internet population in Europe: Russia experienced growth rate of 27% and accounts for 17.5 million of European internet users. But I have to admit that this immense growth is mostly based on the small number of people already connected.

Growth rate of internet audience in European countries (%)

As you can see from the chart above, Russia was followed by France (21%), Spain (15%), and Ireland (15%). One country - Portugal - does not have information for the change since the country was not counted last year. Another country showing some peculiar results is Netherlands with its negative change of 1% which is understandable given that Netherlands has the highest internet penetration rate in Europe as well - 82%: I believe users must have reached a certain saturation with internet and some of them stopped using the WWW.

Adoption rates are remarkably high in Nordic countries with 77% in Denmark, 76% both in Sweden and Norway, and 69% in Denmark.

Internet usage penetration in European countries (%)

It is obvious when you compare the two data sets that Russia with its highest internet users growth rate has the lowest penetration level at the same time. I tend to think it is quite obvious - after all, you can only grow rapidly if you have enough available space to expand to so it would have been amazing to see Netherlands showing any growth at all with its already remarkable internet penetration.

As for the distribution of the countries in the total number of internet users, Russia with its 17.5 million only accounts for 7% of all the European users while the majority of connected people live in the UK (14%), Germany (14%), and France (13%).

Shares of the total number of internet users in European countries

I am pretty sure that once we see the same information updated with the information for the next year we will still have Russia among the leaders (it was on the top position last year as well) while other fast-growing countries, especially France and Switzerland, will probably see a slowdown simply because they will eventually reach the penetration levels that will not permit them to grow much further.