Brain Hackers

It appeared that the country’s Internet population exceeded the 500 million mark by the end of last year. The government-sponsored China Internet Network Information Center has recently calculated some statistics, according to which China added around 28,000,000 new Internet users during the second half of 2011.
In other words, at the end of December 2011, China could boast 513 million Internet users. It means that over 38.3% of the country population already had a connection to the Internet, which is up 4% from last year. Meanwhile, the number of people accessing the worldwide web from their mobile devices has also increased, reaching the mark of 355 million users. Currently, 69.3% of the country’s Internet users connect through their handsets, and this number is also up from 66.2% in 2010.

At the same time, the number of Chinese users connecting to the web through their desktops has dropped to 73.4%, but the number of Internet users accessing the web from their laptops has remained steady at
46.8%. Meanwhile, it has been emphasized that the overall Internet growth in the country has actually been slowing down. The industry experts believe this is because most Chinese citizens within the 10 to 29 year old age range already have access to the Internet, while older people are less likely to express much interest in it.

At the moment, the most popular activities of the Chinese users on the Internet include instant messaging, using search engines, and listening to online music. Indeed, the observers point out that microblogs have been growing rapidly – for instance, their numbers have already reached 250 million users, which is almost 4 times up from 63 million in 2010.