eMarketer predicts that by next year, 3 billion people worldwide will use internet. That’s 42,4% of the world’s total population. The number is expected to be 50% by 2018. By 2017, the number of Indonesian internet users is predicted to surpass Japan, thus making it to have the fifth largest number of internet users in the world.

The model used by eMarketer forecasts that the growth of world’s internet users will keep decreasing up to 5% during 2016-2018. This is way lower than the number back in 2013, which reached more than 10%. This decrease is triggered by the decrease experienced by developed countries, like Japan and the U.S, S they’ve reached 100% of penetration point. Even so, a number of developing countries still show encouraging development.

eMarketer’s Senior Forecasting Analyst Monica Peart stated, “Even though the growth in developed countries has been close to its peak, there is significant room for development in developing countries. India and Indonesia, for instance, will have two digit-growth from now on until 2018.”

The data by eMarketer shows that there are 83,7 million internet users in Indonesia in 2014. The number is predicted to keep increasing and will exceed the milestone of 100 million users by 2016. In 2017, Indonesia is expected to have around 112,6 million internet users, more than Japan which is expected to have ‘only’ 105 million users in the same time frame.

If Indonesia can maintain its remarkable growth as what it shows during 2014-2018, the country may take Brazil’s place as the fourth largest internet ecosystem in the world by 2019 or 2020, right after China, India, and the U.S which indeed have more population.

And this figure looks more realistic than the one released by the government.

Previously, Director General of Application and Information Technology’s Head Heru Tjahjono expected that by the end of 2015, the number of Indonesian internet users will cover 61% of total population, or around 150 million citizens.

The Millenium Development Goals require an internet access which covers 50% of developing countries’ total population by 2015. Prior to that standard, there should be 107 million internet users in Indonesia by 2014, and 139 million by the end of 2015, something which hasn’t been seen by the realistic eMarketer even until 2018.

[Illustration: Shutterstock]