Internet Is Huge with China as the Largest Nation. Good Reason to Stop Ignoring International Users?

So we should be proud of ourselves as everyone reading this online (and you hardly have other options to read it, to tell you the truth) should be a little proud about being a part of something truly massive and large-scale as the internet measurement firm comScore reports that the internet audience has reached 1 billion people back in December.

When measuring people online comScore only counted those over 15 and using a home or office computer to get online so mobile usage and teens and children under 15 are both excluded.

The most interesting fact in the statistics is that Asia Pacific accounted for the largest portion of internet audience with its 41% - the highest share among the world regions. And out of this region the leading country is obviously Chine with its 180 million of people online (or almost 18% of the entire internet population which is almost as much as the entire North America). So here is how the overall web audience is divided between different regions of the world:

To me there is nothing particularly exciting about reaching this impressive figure - it is merely a milestone and a statement of the fact that the world is densely populated and more and more people venture online these days. But I think that what is important in today’s report from comScore is how they finally point out that the web audience from China is actually higher than that from the US and other regions of the world are getting higher shares of the overall internet population.

To me it looks like a reason good enough to finally realize that the web should not be US-focused only forever and some changes are very much needed to include users from other countries not only in use of US-developed online tools and services (sure, Google sites still dominate the web) but in the overall internet economy as well while as of now international users are often considered to be something like trash and are frequently ignored when discussing value of a site.

Here I am talking again about the value of international users - those people who are frequently discriminated in our use of online tools that people in the US always take for granted and who are not valued by advertisers at all. For example, for the last three days I’ve been avoiding many technology blogs and some sites like Reddit as they all serve me nothing but ads of Viagra and other similar pills - these are the usual remnants that are only left for international users.

I am quite certain that owners of technology blogs like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb or Venturebeat will hardly be happy to know that their international visitors are shown ads like this (stupid, shocking and irritating I’d say) but as a publisher I know perfectly well that they hardly have any tools to control what their international users get - and it looks like we don’t deserve anything better. And no other advertisers want to buy anything to serve to international users so this is pretty much the only option available.

Of course showing us such banners could be some kind of a message to us here outside of the US but I really think that now that we are all suffering a huge financial crisis and experiencing deep problems in the online advertising industry as well, it could be just the right time to do something about monetizing international users - like partner with those companies who can sell ads locally and finally realize that your site will have visitors from multiple countries and involving them in generating profit for you may be a good option to serving crappy ads to us. The world is large and incorporating every international visitor into the global internet revenue-generation scheme may be just the right thing to do to improve the situation with the financial crisis.