Nigerian Internet use increasing | Hacker News Reader

Nigerian Internet use increasing

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48 pointsOoTheNigerian73 comments

Perhaps even more relative: internet penetration of the 16 largest countries by population:

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=it_net_us...

Wow! China is a huge market. I know it was very big, but didn't know it's this huge. I wonder if China has equally good Startup ecosystem like USA which promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. Also, another question is - do US startups even have a strategy to focus equally on Chinese market like US market? If yes, how do they go about doing that?

Don't be fooled, if you consider income or even worse spending China is still a tiny market. 20 years from now it might be far more important, but for now it only has a voracious appetite for a small number of imports such as Oil and industrial secrets.

Well, that just means it's a great time to get into that market. If had already become huge and spending was huge, there would be lots of startups focusing on china.

Perfect time to start laying out some groundwork.

I've seen thai school teachers spend $10s of dollars on facebook games. In thai school teacher wages, that is something like like 3% to 10% of their monthly wage, which is significant. Don't underestimate a market like china. Protection from psychological traps like bad spending and keeping up with the jonses tend to be less there too unfortunately/fortunately.

It's somewhat like ignoring the teenager market.

I think it's important to consider population, so maybe measure Internet penetration as a percentage of the population.

For example:

Internet Users in US: 230,630,000 Population of US: 307,006,550 people

That's roughly 75% of the US population.

Internet Users in China: 298,000,000 people Population of China: 1,324,655,000

That's roughly 22.5% of the Chinese population.

However, by looking at the graph, we can also see that the growth of the Internet population is growing (exponentially) at a much faster rate in China than it ever did in the US.

Bingo. Isn't the magic number for hitting near 100% penetration of a household technology around 30%? Once you hit that point, then it will go to nearly 100% within a few years because things just snowball and it is no longer a fringe/geek thing, but something that is common and expected.

I think we all remember when the US had far below 22.5%

You've got a great point there but let me add something. The question if percentages or absolute numbers are valuable depends on the goal of your investigation. When you want to determine the technological advancement of a country going for the relative numbers should be the way to go. However when you want to determine if a country should be a target market for your startup/company absolute numbers are fine. Even though only 22,5% of the Chinese people use the internet 298,000,000 users is still a huge market. Definitely to consider targeting.

Hi niekmass,

You are absolutely correct. The goal of your investigation does in fact dictate if you should use percentages or absolute numbers. Likewise, 298 million Chinese Internet users is nothing to sneeze at!

The president of Nigeria already has 126k fans on facebook http://www.facebook.com/jonathangoodluck and 1700 comments for each of his daily posts.

That's impressive considering that his account is just a couple of months old.

That's small consolation to him; his brother, former president of Nigeria, died last year leaving several million dollars behind. They are currently trying to recover them through the aid of western citizens.

See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525639

Note that the two statements are quite different. The guy you replied to was implying that all Nigerians are scammers. I, on the other hand, implied no such a thing and simply made a joke about a type of fraud commonly originating from Nigeria.

It's about as funny as a joke about how Americans will invade your country, or italians will murder your cousin.

Pointless jokes about silly stereotypes do not belong on forums where people try to discuss reasonably about things.

whoosh!

I get the joke. But it's not funny. I've read the same joke about 1000 times on various forums. It's just a somewhat mean statement with no humour at all.

> about as funny as a joke about [..] Americans [..] or italians

Delivered properly, these can be hilarious.

That's a very uncharitable comment.

Millions of Nigerians work honest jobs to feed and educate their children. It's hard enough that they have to live through the negative stereotype caused by less than 0.1% who are bad guys.

Think about that for a second.

> That's a very uncharitable comment.

Jokes rarely are. It's a joke and as such it shouldn't be taken seriously.

> Millions of Nigerians work honest jobs to feed and educate their children.

Nobody is implying otherwise.

Dude - I know you meant it as a joke but it is still uncharitable.

It's hard to appreciate the other party's POV unless you've lived through the stigma of prejudice that's perpetuated by jokes such as yours.

That said, it's okay. Your comment shows you didn't mean any malice so as an implicit apology, it is accepted.

> stigma of prejudice that's perpetuated by jokes such as yours.

You've had personal experience with stigma for being Nigerian because people you talk to think you’re a scammer? Willing to share/elaborate?

Is it really fair to say that people in China have access to the Internet? Maybe it's better to say that they have access to some AOL-ized version of the Internet, not the actual Internet itself. The difference between an open Internet and a closed one is not just a small difference of degree; they are entirely different things.

There are about 20 or 30 websites blocked in china. Not that many.

websites aren't all equal. The top 20-30 websites in the world account for something like 90% of total internet usage.

The Golden Shield project employs thousands of people. They do a lot more blocking than "20 or 30 websites".

really? only 20 or 30?

Hmm, I think there are more than 20 or 30 western newspapers and they probably are if not blocked then heavily censored.

A very extreme underestimation.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peop...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_websites_blocke...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_censored_by_searc...

About 30 notable websites are blocked, counting from the list you posted.

Even if an accurate representation of the firewall (which it doesn't seem ot be) are you arguing this is acceptable?

I sometimes work with developers in China, it's pretty common for me to send a link to some tech info on a blog etc and then have to copy and email the content instead, since the site is blocked for them. Even one site I created myself, which has <10 visitors/day and barely any content was blocked at some point.

I currently live in China and the firewall isn't as bad as it looks. I used to believe it was meant to censor information but I increasingly believe that it is meant to encourage the digital economy in China. The Chinese alternatives (Baidu, TaoBao, RenRen, etc.) would probably have a much harder time without the firewall. That being said, as a free market enthusiast, I disagree with this kind of politics.

> I currently live in China and the firewall isn't as bad as it looks.

But isn't that because it's ultimately a losing battle? Can't that still be what it was meant for? Promoting Chinese alternatives just seems like a nice benefit in keeping it around.

It's surely also designed to eliminate news of unrest, such as the famous protests, political and economic dissent, and allow prompt and easy arrest of citizens saying the 'wrong thing' on-line, or expressing opinions that might damage the party's hold on power.

A more meaningful graph will be one that shows the % of population with internet access

If shown in percentage...

The first thing I thought when reading the title ("Graphs don't lie :) ) was:

"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics." Presumably, graphs fall under "statistics".

Oh, I thought they fell under "damn lies". My bad.

I cringe when I see that quotation trotted out as some kind of truth. It's a joke, popularized by Mark Twain.

Statistics can be insignificant or misinterpreted, but the statistics themselves aren't lies: they are statements of fact (measurements and calculations based on those measurements). Statistics are some of the best tools we have for teasing meaning out of measurements.

(If the "measurements" are actually made up, then yes, they are lies, but then the fault is with the person cooking the measurements, not the statistical tools they bring to bear. One can also misuse statistical tools, but again, the problem is with the user, not the tools.)

I always felt that the quote indicated that statistics are easily used to mislead with credibility. When I homeschooled my sons, I gave them a choice between the algebra/geometry/calc track and a statistics track. They chose statistics. An interesting book we included in our studies was "How to lie with statistics". (FWIW: I think there was a later book called something like "How to lie with charts and graphs".)

My point was not that statistics are lies but just that the statement "Graphs don't lie" isn't some kind of unquestionable grand truth.

Interesting, that means that a very high proportion of UK citizens are connected to the internet, since the population is about 60 million.

The data on India is interesting. I would have thought there would be more than 50 million internet users in India. That's only about 4 per 100 people.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.BBND.P2

These numbers might be projections

India is not particularly well off. It has a higher poverty rate than Africa, for example.

Is there something I'm missing?

Africa is 45.78% http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=africa+poverty+rate

India is 25% http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=india+poverty+rate

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/14/poverty-india-af...

There are more poor people in eight states of India than in the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa

That doesn't say anything about the poverty rate.

When the vast central Indian Madhya Pradesh state, which has a population of 70 million, was compared with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war-racked African state of 62 million inhabitants, the two were found to have near-identical levels of poverty.

So that means certain parts of India have equal or greater levels of poverty than certain parts of Africa. But the poverty rate as a whole is lower.

Are there any web startups in Nigera that have been acquired or make significant profit?

46k of script and no HTML for it to progressively enhance. That's really disappointing; web authoring at Google is usually highly competent.

I believe increased Internet use

      Will create jobs
      Will decrease crude oil consumption

Nigerians are not the primary consumers of their own oil. No oil producing nation is.

That sounds good, but whats your definition of an oil producing nation? I'd guess the meager amount of oil produced in the US is consumed by the US.

It would be interesting to see also the quality of internet access, like PSTN or DSL etc and if there is any cencorship...

There is no web censorship in Nigeria, only ISP's might ban a user from their network if a report was made about that user. The average 'broadband' speed in Nigeria is 200-400kbps and mostly wireless access. But with the completion of the MainOne submarine cable, it is expected that things here will change for the better. Nigeria's population is huge, 150million although the purchasing power of the average citizen is low, It's a strong emerging market.

Is there a non-Flash version?

Yeah same here, I'm sh*t out of luck on my iPad. So are most mobile users, where's the accessibility Google?

Right, so finally we learn that the US is a bigger country than Sweden. Great.

Based on that graph's numbers (dated 2008) combined with each country's 2009 population census (a percentile or two off, I know...):

  Nigeria: 15%
  United Kingdom: 75%
  Egypt: 17%
  South Africa: 8%
  Sweden: 85%

But look at the rate of growth...

Yes it's impressive, if time stood still and politics never changed, but that's not how the world works :) Everyone knows from the lesson of "retrospectivity" that growth can be just a temporary rise, or just the spike before a decline etc.

If we look at the UK's numbers in that same graph, after having travelled back to 2002 in our time machine, we could also say "but look at the rate of growth the past 4 years!", but looking back at the graph today, with "8 years later" of extra data...

My underlying point was that no mistake in graphs and statistics is as common as the repeated mistake of us trying to predict the future from contemporary numbers, and always ending up being wrong a few years later down the road. Statistics need lots of time to mature and settle.

China freaks me out.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the graph was, "Geez, there's a quite a rise in scammers in Nigeria."

25 million pretty normal people would not find your statement very nice. The U.S sends a lot of Viagra spam - but that does not mean that all the internet users are sending viagra spam.

Spam reaches a lot of people, because that's its intent. Extrapolating from spam is silly.

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