ComScore, Inc. reported that the total global Internet audience (age 15 and older from home and work computers) is now over 1 billion people. And this number excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

That means that people with Home Based Businesses who sell online have a total potential market of over 1,000,000,000 customers. But don’t fall for that old ‘Wow, if we could attract 1% of them to our site and sell 1% of those folks our super duper widget we’ll be rich!” delusion. Doesn’t work that way. But the study does indicate where the big markets are.

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users (41 percent), followed by Europe (28 percent share), North America (18 percent share), Latin-America (7 percent share), and the Middle East & Africa (5 percent share).

China represented the largest online audience in the world in December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience, followed by the U.S. (16.2 percent share), Japan (6.0 percent share), Germany (3.7 percent share) and the U.K. (3.6 percent share).

The most popular property in the world was Google Sites, with 777.9 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites (647.9 million visitors), Yahoo! Sites (562.6 million visitors). Facebook.com, which has grown a dramatic 127-percent in the past year to 222 million visitors, now ranks as the top social networking site worldwide and the seventh most popular property in the world. � Other popular sites, in order by traffic (unique visitors) include AOL, Wikimedia Foundation Sites, eBay, Amazon Sites, CBS Corporation, Fox Interactive Media, Ask Network, and Apple Inc.

Find a niche, segment the market, learn how to reach them, offer an irresistible proposition at a good price with dyno-mite support�then you’ll be rich. Kinda sounds easy that way, doesn’t it? The naked truth, of course, is it’s not.

Nevertheless, one of the trends that heavily affected U.S. Internet usage in 2008 was the economic meltdown, with several of the top gaining site categories reflecting the current environment. Notably, the Job Search category ranked as the top-gaining site category for the year, up 51 percent to nearly 19 million visitors in December 2008, as the millions of Americans affected by the deteriorating job market sought online job resources for assistance. Other top-gaining categories in 2008 included Coupons (up 46 percent to 31.6 million visitors), Politics (up 43 percent to 12 million visitors), and Classifieds (up 27 percent to nearly 53 million visitors).

Other trends report by comScore:

• Search query volume on the five core search engines increased 21 percent in 2008 from the previous year, with Google Sites accounting for nearly 90 percent of this growth.
• Online video viewing accounted for 12.5 percent of Americans� total time spent on the Internet in November 2008, up from 8.5 percent the previous year.
• U.S. Internet users viewed a total of 4.5 trillion display ads during the past twelve months, with the average person viewing more than 2,000 ads per month.
• Retail (non-travel) e-commerce spending grew 6 percent to $130.1 billion in 2008. The year ranked as the softest year for retail e-commerce spending growth since comScore began tracking the industry in 2001.
• The mobile industry continued to witness the growing popularity of smartphones in 2008 with subscriptions to smartphones increasing more than 100 percent during the year.