China has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest Internet market by number of users, a research firm said on recently. The estimate by Beijing-based BDA was based on data from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) which indicated that the country’s Internet users totaled 210 million at end-2007.

Nielsen/NetRatings put the United States Web population at 216 million for the same period, BDA said.

Based on these sources and the assumption that these markets have continued to grow in 2008 to date at the same rates that they grew in 2007, we can conclude that China has by now comfortably surpassed the United States as the world’s largest Internet population,” analyst Bin Liu said in a statement.

BDA added that it expected e-commerce to become the next boom sector in China, as businesses take advantage of the mass market of consumers already online.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) just released its latest semi-year report on development of Internet in China. According to the report, by the end of 2007, the number of Chinese Internet users has reached 210 million, an increase of 48 million compared to the first semester, or 73 million in last year. Among these 73 million new Internet users, 29.17 million, or about 40%, come from rural area. About 50.4 million users use mobile handsets to access Internet, just adding 6 million new mobile Internet users in last six months.

Besides Internet population data, we also need to pay attention on survey results on users online behavior in the report:

• About 34% users access Internet in Internet cafe, most of them(74.8%) are users with high school education or below. Internet cafe is more popular in rural area, about 48% rural Internet users will use Internet cafe.
• The most popular online service is online music, about 86.6% netizens use online music, followed by IM (81.4%), online movies (76.9%), online news (73.6%), search engine (72.4%), online gaming (59.3%) and email (56.5%). If compared with previous report, the usage rates of online music, IM, online movies and online gaming all increased significantly, while the usage rate of online news decrease from 77.3% to 73.6%.
• 23.5% users have their own blogs or spaces, that is about 49.35 million bloggers.
  As for the first thing people will do online, IM chatting is the first choice (39.7%), followed by reading news (20%), playing games (9.3%) and search engine (7.4%), as we said before many Chinese Internet users go online just for IM chatting or playing games.
• In China, IM tools is much more important than email, esp. for users aged under 25.
• Interestingly, the report said 48.3% people trust online news from portal sites, while only 31.4% will trust posts in blogs or BBS. For BBS, Gang Lu just published an excellent post on Chinese BBS phenomenon.
• 22.1% users, or 46.4 million made online shopping in last six months.
• 35.4% users published posts in blogs or BBS. 12.7% people uploaded movies online while 10.4% uploaded short video clips online.

The full report in Chinese can be downloaded (PDF format) from CNNIC.

China is likely to overtake the United States to become the world’s largest Internet market by Web population size: its web population will hit 244 million by the end of 2008 from last year’s 182 million, an increase of 34 percent, said an Internet Society of China report issued recently.

The report’s findings are based on data collected from a survey of 50,786 mainland Internet users and 270 companies across the country, as well as from seminars and interviews with industry experts.

Hu Yanping, chief of the government-back ISC’s development & communication center, estimated that the total Web population will outnumber that of the US as early as June, as broadband penetration grew.

The US had about 210 million Web users by December, with a Internet penetration rate of more than 70 percent. China’s December figure was 13.8 percent.