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captureSeyed Morteza Mousavian, Head of Iran's Digital Media Development Centre reported that 53% of Iranians belong to at least one social media platform. While Iranians only spend on average, five to nine hours a day online, the rest of the global population spends as much as fifteen hours online each day. According to Mousavian, who commented during a conference on "Investment and Business Opportunities in ICT" in Tehran, currently forty-three million people in Iran use the Internet regularly. He also added that the Internet usage in the country had increased drastically with around forty million smartphone users. Mousavian noted that 72% of young adults in Iran are using social media these days, making up the majority of the country's Internet users. Furthermore, Iran has twenty million video gamers who spend over fifteen and a half billion hours playing these games over the course of one year. As a result of copy infringements, the video game market reflected a one hundred and forty million dollar revenue last year. The websites visited most frequently by Iranians tend to be the sites which are hosted within Iran. They also visit sites hosted in the United States fairly often as well. Mousavian has looked into which categories attract web users the most within the country's borders. News and advertising are the most popular, followed by software, gaming, social media, and educational sites. captureGoogle services are also extremely popular among Iranians, with many making use of Google Maps and YouTube, although the service is now blocked in Iran. Google Maps, in particular, got a lot of positive feedback from Iranians last year for their traffic feature which was used in the country. Most individuals who make use of LinkedIn in the region are Iranians who also have a large presence on "business-oriented social networking platforms." Due to the popularity of social media networks in Iran, the government has considered the possibility of creating local social media platforms and also drawing up a set of guidelines to follow for the use of foreign networks.
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