Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

A recent study "2005 Internet Usage and It's Influence over 5 Chinese Cities" indicates the Chinese internet surfers spend an average of 2.73 hours on the World Wide Web each day. This is approaching to the figure 3.0 hours per surfer per day in the US (Data were collected from a representative sample of 4,839 American respondents between the ages of 18 and 64 in June 2004).

What’s more interesting from the report is that the study finds that near 50% of the online users use instant messaging software for work purposes from time to time. The reasons behind this include: “easier and faster than Fax and Email”, “The installation process of the software is much simpler than installing a telephone line”, “it’s much cheaper using chat since phone usages are charged per minutes even for in-city calls in China”…

The instant messaging software Chinese normally use are: QQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger. There are fewer users on iChat (less Mac users in China in general) and AOL. The amount of VOIP usage over the messaging systems has exponentially increased over the last six months.