Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) have produced a map that shows the countries of the world resized by the number of internet users in 2013.

Each hexagon represents 470,000 internet users and the countries are shaded by the proportion of their respective populations that are online. The little white dot you can see at the top of China, for example, is Mongolia.

The map partially reflects population density but it also flags up countries such as India, which is home to 190 million internet users but still has a long way to go in getting all its citizens online.

The OII highlights these contradiction in a blogpost:

Few of the world’s largest internet countries fall into the top category (above 80%) of internet penetration. Looking only at countries with at least 10 million inhabitants, those in the highest fifth of the distribution (quintile) are (in descending order) the Netherlands, the UK, Japan, Canada, South Korea, the US, Germany, Australia, Belgium and France – mostly European and North American countries. Ignoring micro-nations, all but five of the countries with an internet penetration rate of more than 80% are in Europe, North America, or Oceania – the exceptions being Japan, South Korea, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In 2011, Qatar and South Korea were the only countries outside Europe and North America in the group of countries with highest internet penetration.

The OII also mapped this data back in 2011 and since then it has seen a large rise in internet penetration in several African countries.

The proportion of the population on the internet has increased 14.9 percentage points in South Africa, 11 in Kenya and 10 in Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria. However, 29 out of 47 sub-Saharan African countries still have internet penetration of less than 10%, with insignificant growth between 2011 and 2013.

The data is provided by the World Bank, which has been measuring the number of internet users by country since 1990. The latest figures show that only a third of the people on the planet currently have access to the internet.

Cartograms are useful ways of mapping data as they allow you to distort for population size or other factors while still maintaining the rough shape of your geography – we used one for our UK election map.

View the OII’s map in much more detail here.

