Hoorah! It is finally time to release the new Caucasus Internet statistics from the Caucasus Barometer. The data is publicly released on March 1.

I have a TON of posts ready to share. I’ll cover activities, regions, gender, means of access, but let’s start with the basics…

As always, I welcome comments and questions.

As usual, let’s recall that this is merely for adults (certainly there are a lot of teenage users!), but the ownership statistics do reflect households, so it is more inclusive of young people.

Also, as I discussed here, survey data is better than ITU or industry data.

So, let’s get on with it!!

First, let’s look at how many people ever use the Internet. This is not as important as frequent Internet use (because who cares if someone used the Internet once last year, right? That’s not the same as someone that uses it every day.) However, people seem to really care about this.

As of 2012, over half of Armenians, 43% of Georgians, and over a quarter of Azerbaijanis have ever used the Internet. Armenia made quite the jump this year. Notably, there was no increase in Azerbaijan.

Daily Internet use is a more important category – these are people that are potentially getting a lot out of the Internet.

As you can see, a third of Armenians, a quarter of Georgians, and 11% of Azerbaijanis use the Internet daily. Armenia has been making quite large jumps each year since 2009.

I also like to do a combination of weekly and daily users that I call “frequent Internet users” — while a weekly user isn’t reaping the benefits that a daily user could, certainly a weekly user is different from a monthly user! A monthly user is much more like someone that never uses, in my opinion.

43% of Armenians, a third of Georgians, and nearly 20% of Azerbaijanis are online at least weekly. This means that most Internet users are using a lot, which is a bit of a change from the past.

Now, looking at frequency distributions for just 2012.

As I mentioned above, the less-than-weekly users are fairly insignificant this year. But more importantly, the “never” used (which in this illustration I added the “I don’t know what the Internet is”), is still quite high in some countries.

Let’s look more closely at Azerbaijan’s frequency distribution over the past few years.

While there has been about a 10% drop in those that never use the Internet between 2009 and 2012 (and the bulk of that drop was between 2011 and 2012) and the percentage of daily users has doubled between 2009 and 2012, this is still fairly slow growth. (I get into some of the reasons for this in this article.)

—

What about ownership? Let’s look at some trends.

Household Internet connection ownership (this does not include mobile Internet – I’ll deal with that in a forthcoming blog post) grew in all 3 countries this year.

Nearly half of Armenian homes have an Internet connection with some major growth this year! (I’ll look at regional differences in a forthcoming blog post as well.) A third of Georgian homes have Internet and 17% of Azerbaijani homes have Internet.

Unsurprisingly then, these homes have a personal computer.

Elsewhere I argue that since 2008 when netbooks became available for a fairly cheap price, access to a computer is greater. Over half of Armenian homes, 40% of Georgian homes, and 21% of Azerbaijani homes have a computer. In all 3 countries, there was a pretty large jump from 2011.

And mobile phone ownership has essentially hit the entire population in all 3 countries now.