Google dominates Asia-Pacific web traffic

By | 13 July, 2010

Data from Comscore’s Media Metrix service in May 2010 released this week has shown Google was the most visited internet destination across the Asia-Pacific region, racking up 270,000 visitors – more than half of the total.

Top destinations

Global content brands dominate the top of the list with Google reaching a reported 55 percent of the region’s population, Microsoft (2nd) and Yahoo (3rd) well placed and Baidu and Tencent rounding up the top five respectively. Tencent is noted for having the highest rate of engagement – average time on site, pages per visit and visits per visitor – beating the competition which includes heavyweight engagement sites Facebook and Wikipedia.

Other notable sites include Facebook, ranked 9th reaching 85.8 million in the region, with Amazon,17th with 55.3 million, and Apple, 18th with 51.9 million.

The full ranking across the region below comes from the Comscore press release.

Country by country

While summaries of Asian activity are an insightful pan market view, Asia is a hugely diverse continent and each market’s domestic intricacies and consumer behaviour necessitates a unique, local approach.

This is best illustrated by the below chart identifying the most visited website in each of the 13 countries within the report.

Insight from the press release.

An analysis of the most visited Internet properties in each of the 13 individual Asia-Pacific markets revealed differing brand preferences across countries.

Google Sites led as the most-visited property in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, while Yahoo! Sites attracted the most visitors in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.

Microsoft Sites led the market in Australia reaching 93 percent of online users. Local entities topped the list in China and South Korea, with Tencent Inc. and NHN Corporation reaching the largest percentage of Internet users.

In the Philippines, Facebook.com reigned as the most-visited destination reaching 93 percent of online users, the highest penetration of any global market for the social networking site.

The findings back-up a number of known internet habits across the range of consumer markets.

Google has made impressive inroads into the Southeast Asia market, while Indonesia continues to forge a reputation as a social media hotspot (having previous been Asia’s most dominant country on Twitter).

Domestic offerings continue to hold the market in China and South Korea.

Microsoft’s dominance in Australia is interesting, Google domination of English-speaking UK and US markets doesn’t extend Down Under while Yahoo’s strong presence in Asia is reflected in patchy dominance across a few markets.

However

Perhaps crucially, however, this research does not include statistics from web visits from public computers or mobile phones.

With required hardware and internet access out of many Asian’s budgets, mobile internet has the potential to become the primary medium for accessing the web. Currently smartphone ownership is generally small but growing (one in ten newly purchased devices are smartphones).

For now the Comscore’s results are likely reflective of the market and consumer behaviour, despite the methodology. However going forward research becomes increasingly less valuable if it fails to include other types of internet access, particularly mobile.



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