Updated: Mar 10, 2016
According to data published by Nielsen Online, The International Telecommunications Union and other reliable sources, approximately 3,366,261,156 people in the world were Internet users in November 2015.
This accounts for approximately 47% of the world’s population and is an approximately 830% increase from the number of internet users in 2000.
Who is an Internet User?
Nielsen Online defines an active internet user as a person that has viewed the internet within the last 30 days.
Internet Penetration by Continent (Nov. 2015)
Internet Penetration by Country
A few notes from the chart above
- Not surprisingly there is a high correlation between countries with high GDP per capita, PPP(purchasing power parity) and the percentage of its population that use the internet.
- Scandinavian countries and Canada have the highest percentage of their population that use the internet while most African countries have the lowest percentage of their population that are internet users.
- Argentina and Kenya have the highest percentage of their population that are internet users in South America and Africa respectively.
Internet Users & GDP per capita, PPP
Not surprisingly, there is a high correlation between countries with high GDP per capita, PPP (purchasing power parity) and the percentage of its population that uses the internet.
Countries with the Highest Population of Non-internet Users (Nov. 2015)
| Country | Population with No Internet Access |
| India | 876,695,584 |
| China | 687,512,535 |
| Indonesia | 182,993,674 |
| Pakistan | 167,045,410 |
| Bangladesh | 115,016,745 |
| Ethiopia | 94,797,423 |
| Brazil | 92,883,138 |
| Nigeria | 88,862,132 |
| Congo D.R. | 75,730,202 |
| Philippines | 62,481,070 |
| Mexico | 61,086,655 |
| Myanmar | 55,137,482 |
| Russia | 54,993,525 |
| Vietnam | 47,048,835 |
| Thailand | 44,259,437 |
| Turkey | 43,870,423 |
| Tanzania | 42,048,344 |
| United States | 41,688,784 |
A few notes from the data above:
- There are more than 40 million Americans that are not internet users. This is more people than the population of 200 countries on Earth.
- There are more non-internet users in India than China, even though China is the most populous country in the world and has more than 100 million more citizens than India.
Data Sources: CIA Factbook and Internet World Stats
