Net surfers in Asia the most active

The region’s surfers were most active in terms of time spent per surfing session, the number of page views a session and the duration of a page viewed.

When contacted, ACNielsen eRatings.com managing director (South Asia) Hoe Chin Fee said that the findings were based on a sample size of 162,520 home Internet users in 23 countries worldwide.

The report said South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore were the top four nations for number of page views per surfing session. South Korea led with 90 Web pages a session, followed by Taiwan (76), Hong Kong (62) and Singapore (56). This compares with a global average of 44 Web pages per session (see Table below).

In terms of time spent per surfing session, South Korean Internet users were online the longest, with about 42 minutes. This was followed by Hong Kong and Brazil with about 38 minutes, and Taiwan and Australia with about 36 minutes and 35 minutes respectively.

"Surfers in South Korea, Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, Hong Kong are still exhibiting behavior typical of early Internet markets," Hoe said in a statement. "This includes spending a longer time browsing the Web to learn the landscape and navigate from site to site. Over time, we would expect surfers in these markets to identify the sites which meet their needs and considerably narrow their monthly surfing activity."

According to the report, surfers from Australia and New Zealand remained the "stickiest" in the world. They spent an average of 52 seconds to view a Web page.

Meanwhile, the index claimed that the worldwide Web population hit 390 million in April, compared with 380 million in March.

Nielsen//NetRatings is an Internet audience measurement service provided by ACNielsen eRatings.com, a venture between ACNielsen Corp, NetRatings Inc and Nielsen Media Research.

Nielsen//NetRatings Global Internet Index (April 2001)