Today, 43% of the population in Serbia uses Internet, which is around 2.7 million. Although this percentage is up by 72% compared to 2006, it is still falls into middle tier compared to other European countries and the US. However, further segmentation of the population by age reveals a totally different picture. Percentage of Internet users among younger population between 15 and 50 years of age is 71% which is by far a better result than most of the European countries. Going further down the age scale, this percentage rises even higher and reaches a sky high 81%. If the compound segmentation is being done adding the regional criteria, it also speaks in favor of high Internet penetration among young population in urban areas.  It is evident that the biggest drawback for the higher overall Internet penetration lies among population above 50 years of age. This percentage is especially low in the 60+ category. What is encouraging is the pace this population adopts Internet as the percentage rose six times since 2002.  The persuasive power of television remains uncompromised even with the increasing level of people seeking for product information over Internet as a basis for their purchasing decisions. However, after taking a closer look at what are the “reliable” sources of information for buyers in Serbia we see “other people” accounting for 30% of interviewees’ answers. This is where forums and discussion groups set in as the easiest way to actually get other people’s opinions. Not to be underestimated is the fact that even the closest members of families very often communicate with each other using social networks and chat software.  All in all, Internet is becoming more and more important for people, just as it is and should be picking up as communication tool for advertisers. A slightly discouraging finding of GfK’s research is the fact that only 8% of the interviewees said that what they learned from Internet changed their buying behavior, whilst only 7% actually bought something after being approached by advertisers over the Internet.  Based on the findings of GfK, combined with the respective data for other countries, Serbia is a Facebook champion, or at least one of the champions. Facebook has over 700 million users globally (on nearly 6 billion population) while almost third of population in Serbia is using Facebook. Percentage of Internet users using Facebook in Serbia reaches 87% which is the second highest level, right behind Iceland with 93%. Facebook is also by far the most visited web page on Internet with 34%. It is not hard to guess that many of them have Facebook as a start page of their web browsers. What follows is Google search engine, which is followed by YouTube entertainment and Serbian on-line portals of daily newspaper.
Source Balkans.com
