Yesterday morning the participants opened their blogs, which I believe most regarded as a very interesting exercise. We moved on to some statistics about the use of the internet globally and in different world regions and countries. Maybe surprisingly, almost half of all internet users in the world are nowadays in Asia (more than one billion people), much more than the combined number of internet users in Europe and North America. Counting the share of the population that is using the internet, North America is however the top region in the world with four out of five people being connected to the web.
Africa is still at the bottom end in both charts, but for the last five years the continent has also experienced the biggest growth in the number of the internet users. There are now 167 million internet users in Africa, which is about one seventh of the total population of the continent. Currently the biggest growth can be seen in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and also Tanzania, where the number of internet users has multiplied in the last three years, mainly due to a fast increasing number of people using the internet via their mobile phones. In Tanzania, there are today 5.6 million internet users, the seventh biggest number in Africa after Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, South Africa and the Sudan.
What are the people then using the internet for? From the charts updated on the web trafficking site Alexa, we noticed that globally the most popular websites are Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Wikipedia. The media doesn’t perform very well in the statistics. BBC was the 53rd website on the list, CNN was in the position 88, and the American online news media Huffington Post was 95th. So the conclusion was that at least globally people use the internet mainly for other kinds of fact-finding or communication, instead of reading news.
In Tanzania, however, media websites are suddenly getting more and more popular among the internet audience. There were totally 16 media websites among the Top 100 list, mostly local media, including two popular blogs. Most popular media websites were BBC (read both in English and Kiswahili), Mwananchi (the biggest daily newspaper), Michuzi blog (online media which started originally as the blog of photojournalist Issa Michuzi), Global Publishers (a collection of tabloid newspapers), IPP Media (the biggest private media house including a TV station, a national radio station and newspapers in both Kiswahili and English) and Millard Ayo (entertainment blog by Clouds FM radio DJ who actually launched his first blog during our first internet training in Dar es Salaam 2008).
Another interesting thing we found out from the Alexa list was that the most popular website in Tanzania is not the Google, as elsewhere in the world, but Facebook. “Tanzanians like gossiping instead of searching for information”, was a common explanation by the participants. The popularity of Facebook could also explain why so many media websites have recently managed to increase their popularity. One reason could be that in Facebook people often share links to interesting news they read in the media. Another explanation is that now Tanzanians, often using their mobile phones to reach the internet, have finally learnt to visit local news media online and free of costs, instead of paying hundreds of shillings for buying a print copy.
For reviews and summaries of statistics and other things we did on Day 2, see the postings of Hamisi Kibari of Habari Leo or Nurdin Selemani from RFI Kiswahili. Mcharo Mrutu from Channel Ten goes on to explain some of the business concerns facing the traditional media, when especially a young and urban audience is searching for news online. Zuhura Selemani from the University of Dar es Salaam has written a short essay on other challenges during the age of the internet, from digital divides to plagiarism and how the constant use of internet is affecting the human brains.
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