A Decade In Digital: 10 Years of the #GlobalDigitalReports Series (webinar recording)

On November 30, 2021, Simon Kemp celebrated a decade of the Global Digital Reports series with a lighthearted #NerdStream. He shared some of the stats and trends that have stood out for him over the past 10 years, and answered questions about the numbers, as well as how they produce the reports.

You can read his full analysis of A Decade In Digital in this article.

Some highlights:

I've often said that the DataReportal site is a useful starting point for Immigrant and Refugee-serving organizations to start understanding the internet, mobile/smartphone, and social media habits of Newcomers. For example, here are some interesting stats for top immigrant source countries:

• China is now home to more than 1 billion internet users, which means that roughly 70 percent of the country’s total population is now online. Despite its large unconnected population, however, China is still home to more than 1 in 5 of all the world’s internet users at the end of 2021.
• India is now home to more than 650 million internet users – 6½ times as many as a decade ago. But India is still home to the world’s largest unconnected population, and more than half of the country’s 1.4 billion inhabitants are yet to come online. Women in rural areas of the country are disproportionately less likely to use the internet than the population as a whole.
• In the Philippines more than 75 million people across the country are now online, which equates to 68 percent of the national population. But looking beyond user numbers, perhaps the most interesting data point when it comes to digital in the Philippines is how much time people in the country spend online. The typical internet user in the Philippines now spends more than 11 hours per day online, compared to a global average of just under 7 hours per day. A significant share of the country’s online time is dedicated to social media activities.

You should definitely spend some time exploring DataReportal's region and country reports.

Internet users across Asia now spend almost 12 times as much time using the internet each day as they did just 10 years ago. However, this regional average is actually quite a bit below the current global average of 6 hours and 58 minutes.

Working-age internet users in South-East Asia spend an average of 3¼ hours per day using social media, which is 33 percent more than the global average of just under 2½ hours per day.

Primary reasons internet users aged 16 to 64 use the internet vs using social media:

Most used social platforms