There are 11 countries in the world with more than 100 million people. In decreasing order, these countries are: China, India, United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Japan and Mexico. The total population of these countries account for approximately 60% of the world’s population.

What are people in these countries doing online?

Let’s look at the 10 most popular websites in each country (alexa.com). On average, nearly 4 out of the 10 most popular websites are either social networking sites or blogs. The others among the top 10 sites mostly consist of search engine homepages.

There are a few exceptions as China does not have any social networking sites or blogs in its top 10 most visited websites, whereas Russia has 6 social networking sites or blogs in its top 10.

What are the implications for international or local business operations? It is clear that doing social networking online has now become a must without which we run the risk of going out of business. If your customers are social networking online, you should do as well. The second thing is that people use search engines to find information, and therefore you should publish relevant content in proper channels which they may find when searching for information.

For more detailed information on the most popular websites in each country, please see the attachment.

top 10 most visited websites in the largest countries of the world 14052012