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Each year on Canada Day, WebFuel does something BIG. Why? Aside from being proudly Canadian, and wanting to celebrate our heritage, we are an agency that specializes in Search and Digital Marketing in Canada. But when it comes to the online space, what does being Canadian mean?

This year we are posting industry-related stats related to Canada. They are what make us unique.

Internet

Where do Canadians rank in the world in terms of Internet usage? They rank high. Canada is one of the top three countries worldwide. According to the Internet World Stats, there are 28,469,069 Internet users in Canada (as of mid-year 2012). In other words, 83% of the Canadian population is engaged with the web. This number would, of course, be even higher today.

Did You Know?: The average Canadian spends 45 hours each month online.

Domains

During the last five years, global domain name registrations increased 70% to almost 240 million domains – according to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA).  There are over two millions domains registered in Canada. Canadians are patriotic when it comes to Internet domains. According to CIRA’s Factbook 2013, 49% of Canadians strongly prefer .CA to the .COM by a wide margin for business (49% versus 17%). In addition to loving our .CA, Canada’s top-level domain is one of the fastest growing TLDs in the world. It ranks fourth among its country code top-level domain (ccTLD) counterparts. In January of this year, Canadians could now register domains with French characters and accents. This of course helps to support the country’s both official languages as well as Anglophone and Francophone Internet users.

Search Engines

Which Search Engine do Canadians prefer? Like many other countries, the Search Engine of choice is Google. The difference of course is that most searchers use Google Canada (as in Google.ca). They can search via English or French interfaces.  Searching via Google.com is an option (although less popular).

Did You Know?: YouTube is the second most popular Search Engine in Canada (not Bing or Yahoo!)

Social Media

One in three Anglophone Canadians engage with Social Media on a daily basis, according to a report by the Media Technology Monitor published earlier this year. Canada leads the world in watching videos (per view). For business, LinkedIn ranks the highest in Social Media use. According to Techvibes, there are currently over seven million LinkedIn users in Canada. Facebook however remains the most popular social network outranking all the others.

Did You Know?: 93% of social media users use Facebook

Yes Canadians are indeed unique in the online space!