A new extensive report, focused on Internet and mobile usage, states that the global social media population continues to increase on a fast pace. According to the Digital, Social and Mobile in 2015 research, the number of active social media population has now reached nearly 2.08 billion.
Compared to one year ago, the number of active social media population has jumped by 12% or 222 million. That means that at least every fourth person in the world today does not simply have a social media account, but is also activity using it. In addition, the report has also estimated that less than one billion of all active web users show no presence on social media websites.
Also, researchers have found that the amount of people who are actively using social media networks through their mobile devices has increased to over 1.68 billion. As a result, its penetration has reached 23%. That is just 6% below the global social media penetration. Simply said almost all social media users have started to rely on their smartphones and tablets to update their online social status.
Namely, mobile devices are predicted to push global internet penetration up. According to the study, in 2016, active web population will make up more than 50% of the entire global population. In comparison, internet population in January 2015 is estimated at almost 42%. Moreover, just one year ago, it amounted to 35%.
Even though the global average internet penetration is 42%, it is not equally distributed. For instance, web population in Iceland, Bermuda and Bahrain is almost equal to that of the countries populations. In South Sudan and North Korea, on the other hand, just 0.1% of the people have access to the internet.
There is also a gap between the web connection speeds in the world that seems to be widening. The global average internet connectivity speed is 4.5Mbps. However, users in India get just 2Mbps, whereas those in South Korea enjoy a connectivity speed over 25Mbps.
UAE Internet Population
According to the report, the United Arab Emirates has the second highest internet penetration in the world – 92%. Even though web penetration in the Middle East region continues to be rather low (36%), the UAE active web population has witnessed a rise by 95% since January 2014. In addition to that, UAE web users love to spend time browsing the internet. The study informs that the country’s web population spends an average 5.1 hours per day on desktop or laptop PCs and another 3.6 hours on their mobile devices.
The active social media population in the United Arab Emirates has also jumped. Over the past one year, it registered an increase by 23%. As a result, the number of people who actively use social media websites in the UAE has reached 5.3 million.
