By large, Internet has become an important part of our daily life routine. The core importance acquired by this communication medium can be judged with the fact that in certain economies Internet access has been declared as a human right whereas United Nation in 2011 has also proposed to make Internet access a human right. Presently more than one third of world population is on the Internet and some recent analysis reveal that almost 8 new people are coming onto the Internet every second.
2011 had been a fascinating year with regards to Internet access and usage trends. We will try to explore statistics covering various segments of global Internet arena during last year. These statistics have been gathered from Royal Pingdom, InternetWorldStats, Gartner and Netcraft.
At the end of 2011, there were 3.146 billion e-mail accounts worldwide while on average 112 mails were sent and received per day by corporate users during 2011. A total of 300 million websites were added in the Internet space during 2011. A total of 200 million users were added to Facebook and 250 million tweets per day were recorded during the last year. A total of 201.4 billion videos were viewed per month over the Internet and by the end of 2011, YouTube hosted 1 trillion playback videos.
Following is the detail statistics on various elements of the Internet as provided by Royal Pingdom.
- 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
- 27.6{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
- 19{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
- 112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
- 71{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
- 360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
- $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
- 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
- 0.39{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).
Websites
- 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
- 300 million – Added websites in 2011.
Web servers
- 239.1{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2011.
- 68.7{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2011.
- 34.4{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Growth in the number of NGINX websites in 2011.
- 80.9{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Growth in the number of Google websites in 2011.
Domain names
- 95.5 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2011.
- 13.8 million – Number of .net domain names at the end of 2011.
- 9.3 million – Number of .org domains names at the end of 2011.
- 7.6 million – Number of .info domain names at the end of 2011.
- 2.1 million – Number of .biz domain names at the end of 2011.
- 220 million – Number of registered domain names (Q3, 2011).
- 86.9 million – Number of country code top-level domains (.CN, .UK, .DE, etc.) (Q3, 2011).
- 324 – Number of top-level domains.
- 28{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Market share for BIND, the number one DNS server type.
- $2.6 million – The price for social.com, the most expensive domain name sold in 2011.
Internet users
- 2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.
- 922.2 million – Internet users in Asia.
- 476.2 million – Internet users in Europe.
- 271.1 million – Internet users in North America.
- 215.9 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
- 118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.
- 68.6 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
- 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
- 45{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Share of Internet users under the age of 25.
- 485 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
- 36.3{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Internet penetration in China.
- 591 million – Number of fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions worldwide.
Social media
- 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
- 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011.
- 350 million – Number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone.
- 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
- 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
- 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user.
- 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011).
- 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter.
- 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards.
- $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011.
- 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
- 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
- 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011).
- 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts.
- 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide
Videos
- 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
- 140 – The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth.
- 48 hours – The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- 1 – The most viewed video on YouTube during 2011 was Rebecka Black’s “Friday.”
- 82.5{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Percentage of the U.S. Internet audience that viewed video online.
- 76.4{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – YouTube’s share of the U.S. video website market (December 2011).
- 4,189,214 – Number of new users on Vimeo.
- 201.4 billion – Number of videos viewed online per month (October 2011).
- 88.3 billion – Videos viewed per month on Google sites, incl. YouTube (October 2011).
- 43{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} – Share of all worldwide video views delivered by Google sites, incl. YouTube.
Images
- 14 million – Number of Instagram accounts created during 2011.
- 60 – The average number of photos uploaded per second to Instagram.
- 100 billion – Estimated number of photos on Facebook by mid-2011.
- 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.
- 4.5 million – Number of photos uploaded to Flickr each day.
- 6 billion – Photos hosted on Flickr (August 2011).
- 1 – Apple iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on Flickr.
While we have entered into a new year, the growth and development of global Internet arena is expected to take further acceleration.
