China now has the largest home and work Internet population, with 347 million users, representing 54% of all internet users in the Asia-Pacific region, according to comScore.
The 2013 China–Taiwan–Hong Kong Digital Future in Focus report, showed that the online audience in mainland China skews younger than the global average, in contrast with Hong Kong whose online audience is more mature (40% of users age 45 and older). Meanwhile, Taiwan has a larger middle aged group of users.
However, Taiwan's per visitor usage is among the highest in the region at 26.1 hours, compared with the mainland Chinese, who spend only an average of 16.1 hours on average. Hong Kong users, meanwhile, also spend a high 23.7 hours on the internet.
China also trails behind Hong Kong and Taiwan in average time spent on social networking sites. Taiwanese internet users spend on average 398 minutes on social media, while Hong Kong people spend about 251 minutes. In China, internet users spend only 69 minutes on average in social networking sites.
Because Facebook and Twitter are still effectively blocked in the country, the most popular social media destinations are TencentQQ and Weibo sites. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, however, Facebook is the clear favorite, followed by Yahoo! Wretch and SINA Microblogging,
Overall, the report noted that Asia-Pacific is now home to the biggest proportion of the world's internet users (41%). This was followed by Europe (27%) and North America (14%).
This is in stark contrast with statistics in 1996 when internet usage was just beginning. At that time, around 66% of internet users were from the United States.