Forrester: India to be World's 3rd largest Internet market by 2013

The number of people online around the world will grow more than 45 percent to 2.2 billion users over the next five years, according to a new report by Forrester Research, Inc titled "Global Online Population Forecast, 2008 To 2013".India will be the third largest Internet user base by 2013 - with China and the US taking the first two spots, respectively.Forrester estimates number of Internet users in India currently to be 52 million and expects India to have an average growth rate of 10-20 % respectively.According to Forrester

While per capita online spending is likely to remain highest in North America, Western Europe, and the developed markets of Asia throughout the next five years, the shifting online population and growing spending power among Asian consumers means that Asian markets will represent a far greater percentage of the total in 2013 than they do today,” said Forrester Research Senior Analyst Zia Daniell Wigder. “Multinational organizations must understand the dynamics of the shifting global online population to ensure that they are positioned to take advantage of emerging international opportunities.”

These numbers are primarily analysts projections and need to be taken with a pinch of salt firstly larger online population doesn't translates into greater ad spend on Internet as a medium and so Indian market will not be as easy to monetize as the US one.Secondly the growth of the Indian Internet market will be heavily dependent on the regional language space since so far Internet has been the space for the affluent English speaking class and the vast majority of Hindi and other language speaking crowd has been ignored .Amongst the English speaking crowd we do not have much room to grow so unless effort on to bring the mass on Internet succeeds Internet in India will not become a growth story.