For those who don’t know, Alexa, a web information company, keeps a list of popular sites by category and by visitor location. Alexa’s list of Top Sites by Country may not include every country, but it still provides information on the browsing habits of 16 African nations. Such empirical data contradicts the notion that Internet users in developing countries will not visit slow-to-load sites. In general, the most visited sites are search engines (various languages of Google, in particular), which offer only 17-20kb of data per load. However, YouTube and Facebook are surprisingly popular in the featured African countries, given the relatively slow connections speeds across the continent. The main pages of YouTube and Facebook may take anywhere from 15-20 times as long to load as the simple Google home page, but visitors seem undeterred. Perhaps these countries have some of the fastest Internet speeds in Africa, or maybe Africans have greater patience than American or European web surfers. Or, quite possibly, the Internet in Africa is still considered more of a novelty due to its state of broadband infancy.

The findings also show that blogging hasn’t necessarily caught on throughout the continent, although the practice is noticeably popular in certain areas. For example, Blogger.com ranks as the 9th most popular site in the U.S., and #11 in the United Kingdom. However, the blogging site is #5 in Nigeria, #6 in Kenya, and #7 in South Africa. These nations are all relatively large in terms of population, and have decent infrastructure, but its their focus on education that has allowed blogging to emerge as a form of communication.

A summary is below::