With all of the activity in Kazakhstan right now, I wanted to pull some findings from a conference paper/ article in submission about Central Asian Internet. (I can’t post the entire paper while it is still in submission – sorry!) If you have questions or are interested in more detailed analysis, contact me and I’d be happy to do what I can.

Here’s Kazakh Internet penetration according to the ITU (which frequent readers know I’m not a fan of because it uses the telecom companies’ information to determine adoption):

And here’s the data from the paper, national, from spring 2011:

In all of my work I emphasize the importance of ‘frequent use’ as a more salient category of Internet use than ‘ever’ used.

FINDINGS:

In our paper, we model antecedents to Internet awareness, adoption (ever used), and frequent use.

In Kazakhstan, the strongest determinants (in order from strongest) of AWARENESS that the Internet exists were: age, urbanness, education, and economic wellbeing (although economic wellbeing wasn’t strong – statistically significant, but not as strong as the others). (This model explained 13% of the variance in awareness.)

In plain English this means that younger people, more urban people, those with more education, and those with more wealth are more likely to be in the 80% that know what the Internet is.

The strongest determinants (in order from strongest) of ADOPTION (ever having used) were age, economic wellbeing, urbanness, and education. (And this model was set up to control for the effect of these variables on awareness first…) (This model explained 33% of the variance in Internet adoption.)

In plain English this means that younger people, wealthier people, more urban people, and those with more education are more likely to be in the 50% that have ever used the Internet.

The strongest determinants (in order from strongest) of FREQUENT USE were age, urbannesses, and education. Economic wellbeing wasn’t a significant factor, but I’d imagine that the economic barrier exists more at the ‘ever used’ stage and once you’ve gotten over that, frequent use isn’t as much of a cost issue. (This model explained (a whopping!) 49% of the variance in use. (This is really high.))

In plain English this means that younger people, more urban people, and those with more education are more likely to be in the 29% that use the Internet frequently (at least weekly).

So what are Kazakhs doing online?

Of those that are online at least weekly,  85% do email, 77% read news (as a side note, this is quite high compared to what I’ve found in my work in the rest of Central Asia and the Caucasus), 73% are on social networking sites (this is normal compared to the Caucasus) (47% on Odnoklassniki, 43% on vKontake, 14% on Facebook, 7% on Twitter), ~40% interact with blogs (this is very high compared to the rest of Central Asia and the Caucasus), and 23% watch YouTube.

Access points vary.  2/3rd get online via the own PC, most at home (60% of frequent users). Public places are less common that home — 44% at work, 33% at school, 33% at a cafe on a public computer, 35% at a cafe with their own laptop. Mobile Internet is used by 55% of frequent users.

For what it is worth, the Kazakhstan Internet landscape is very different from the rest of Central Asia and the Caucasus — demographically and in the activities engaged in.