The NewsDemon Blog

The Internet economy among G-20 nations is expected to nearly double by 2016, reaching $4.2 trillion (up from $2.3 trillion in 2010), according to a projection released today on USENET Newsgroups.

The big drive in the web economy over the next few years will be a massive influx of new users — with 3 billion users in 2016, up from 1.9 billion in 2010. The ‘new’ Internet is no longer largely Western, accessed from your PC. It is now global, ubiquitous, and participatory.

While the projections sound like a major shift, they’re actually slightly more conservative than other estimates posted recently. Anoter newsgroup post reports for example, estimates that we’ll see 5 billion mobile data subscribers by 2016.

Come 2016, almost 70 percent of Internet users in G-20 nations will be from emerging markets, the report projects, whereas it was just 56 percent in 2010. The newsgroup post also estimates that China will have 800 million Internet users by then — “about the same number as France, Germany, India, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. combined,” it wrote in the release today.

The big takeaway for business owners is that they’ll have to pay even more attention to the Internet over the next few years if they want to survive. Boston Consulting notes that businesses that make extensive use of social media and USENET grow faster, according to a survey of over 15,000 businesses. U.S. companies with high and medium web presences are expected to grow 17 percent in the next year, compared with just 12 percent growth for those not online.