Internet Usage and Making Money Online

Web search giant, Yahoo and consumer information group, Nielsen conducted a survey on the online habits of Filipinos. The survey was conducted on the months of October to November and involves 1,200 respondents. The results are very startling and most worrying.

The survey results showed that the country’s internet usage had increase from 23 percent in 2007 to 28 percent in 2008. Only has 22 million have internet access out of the 90 million or so population. The majority of users belong to the ages 10 and 29. Based on the age range you can already guess what these users are up to when using the internet. Most Filipinos use internet for communication, 63 percent of the respondents is using it for sending emails and instant messaging. The survey also showed that Filipinos do not trust banking or even purchasing online as these two habits only consists three percent each. And yup you’re guess is right, 53 percent are just spending their time playing games and 51 percent for socializing. This is the part that worrying as these last two can be considered as a waste of time.

Most access the internet through internet cafes, in fact as much as 71 percent of users. The cost of using internet cafes is in the range of 10 to 25 PHP per hour. Let’s say the average user spends two hours each day for 5 days a week, internet usage per month could amount to 400 PHP on the cheap side and 1,000 PHP at the high end. If you subscribe for internet connection through ISP’s, the cost is also substantial. Internet connection offered in PLDT's DSL Xperience package with connection speed of up to 1.0 Mbps is 999.00 PHP monthly. So as you can see internet usage is expensive and the young generation is wasting it by playing games and socializing.

It seems a lot of Filipinos are still aren’t aware of the earning potential of the internet. A lot of information is available online that can actually be considered as an opportunity. If you’re money minded, you can search on the web for useful tips on personal finance or for the best certificate of deposit rates. The survey shows that fifty-eight percent of Filipinos do use search engines.

For the young one’s there’s a lot of earning opportunities like for example blogging. Filipinos speak and write English and blogging is a platform where they can showcase this and at the same earn. Blogging is very popular as 42 percent of the survey respondents read blogs. And dig this, 32 percent owns a personal blog, that's 1 in every 3 Filipino internet users. But how many actually generate income using this platform? As a blogger you can earn by writing articles and through affiliates of commercial sites. Did you know you can earn at least $10 by writing articles in your blog or for other sites?

So why waste hours of your day playing games and paying hefty amount for it when in fact you can earn substantial cash by harnessing the internet’s earning potential? Somewhere someone in the archipelago is making money by blogging, telemarketing, developing web sites, medical transcriptions and a lot more. Why won’t you?