PHL ranks 12th among countries with highest number of Internet users

The Philippines ranked 12th in the Internet World Stats' (IWS) list of top 20 countries with the highest number of internet users in the world.

Internet usership in the country jumped from two million in December 31, 2000 to 67 million as of December 31, 2017 — a growth of 3,250 percent — despite the country's internet services ranking among the slowest and worst in the world.

Of the 67 million internet users in the Philippines, 62 million are Facebook users, according to IWS.

This marked a 62.9 percent internet penetration in the country's overall population of 106,512,074 and Facebook penetration rate of 58.2 percent.

China ranked first on the list with 772 million internet users out of their population of 1,415,045,928; another super-nation, India, came in second with 462,124,989 internet users out of 1,354,051,854.

The rest of the top 10 are as follows:

• United States - 312,322,257 internet users
• Brazil -  149,057,635 internet users
• Indonesia - 143,260,000 internet users
• Japan - 118,626,672 internet users
• Russia - 109,552,842 internet users
• Nigeria - 98,391,456 internet users
• Mexico - 85,000,000 internet users
• Bangladesh - 80,483,000 internet users

Data used in the IWS' rankings came from country studies by the International Telecommunications Union and Facebook Inc. —Rie Takumi/KBK, GMA News