The World Wide Web finally surpassed 1 Billion visitors in December 2008 according to Comscore. In addition, China’s internet audience is now larger than that of the United States. Both of these numbers are significant because it bodes well for freedom and eventual democracy for all.

While it is true that China is restricting the information flow on the internet in China, smart hackers who can break through firewalls can break through China’s information fire walls. Eventually, governments who thwart the will of their people fall and often with the violent loss of their own lives.

Following are the charts from Comscore:

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 percent, followed by Europe (28 percent share), North America (18 percent share), Latin-America (7 percent share), and the Middle East & Africa (5 percent share).

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

China represented the largest online audience in the world in December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience, followed by the U.S. (16.2 percent share), Japan (6.0 percent share), Germany (3.7 percent share) and the U.K. (3.6 percent share).

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

In a joint survey conducted by Hearst Electronics Group and Goldstein Group Communications (GGC) it was discovered that companies with marketing budgets are moving to online marketing rapidly.

“This type of data reveals best practices among business marketers at a time of tremendous flux,” said GGC President Joel Goldstein. “The sense of urgency to move to online marketing has been felt by leading marketing organizations for some time now, but the extent to which budgets have been redefined is dramatic.”

This is because the quality of the leads is proving to be better.

“Part of the reason marketers are so willing to devote such a large portion of their budgets to online may be tied to lead quality. The single best source of leads, they report, is their web site, at 24 percent, followed closely by search engines at 19 percent. While one might expect that high spending for online tactics would lead to strong lead quantity, this question dealt instead with a marketer’s source of their BEST leads.”

What this means for Internet Marketers is they are going to have stiff competition in their niches if the larger companies are there too, once companies get what Internet Marketing is about. They are starting to show signs that the large companies do get it. For instance, they are starting to show up in social networking sites like Twitter and participating i.e. BestBuy and Comcast not to mention Microsoft and Apple.

In reality, this just reinforces that the small and medium business marketers are doing the right thing and since smaller is faster (remember the British defeat of the great Spanish Armada?) then the SMBs can be more focused and use guerilla marketing to profitably grow their businesses.

This is not to say that Direct Marketing is dead or even dying. It is to say that if the not so large companies are not using the Internet then they are missing a great opportunity to expand and survive during the current economic condition.