The Internet 2009 – In A Nutshell

Christian Harris

Christian Harris, 25/01/2010, posted in "Analysis"

Christian Harris is editor of BCW. Christian is an IT journalist with over 17 years industry experience. In that time he has launched, edited and written for numerous magazines ...more info

Christian Harris is editor of BCW. Christian is an IT journalist with over 17 years industry experience. In that time he has launched, edited and written for numerous magazines and Web sites including PC Magazine, ZDNet, TechWorld, VNUnet, PC Advisor, PCW, GameSpot, Stuff, Press Gazette, Web User, The Daily Mail and The Guardian. As a copywriter/blogger, Christian also works on freelance marketing projects that include producing Web sites and writing white papers, case studies and press releases. Christian has a BA (Hons) in Publishing from the London College of Communication. ...less info

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The Internet is growing at such a fast past that it hurts my head. To put this into perspective, Web site monitoring gurus Pingdom have revealed some amazing statistics.

So what happened with the Internet in 2009? How many Web sites were added? How many e-mails were sent? How many Internet users were there? Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

E-mail

• 90 trillion – The number of e-mails sent on the Internet in 2009
• 247 billion – Average number of e-mail messages per day
• 1.4 billion – The number of e-mail users worldwide
• 100 million – New e-mail users since the year before
• 81% – The percentage of e-mails that were spam
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year
• 200 billion – The number of spam e-mails per day (assuming 81% are spam)

Web sites

• 234 million – The number of Web sites as of December 2009
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache Web sites in 2009
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS Web sites in 2009
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE Web sites in 2009
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx Web sites in 2009
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd Web sites in 2009

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.)
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009)
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009)
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse)
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user)
• 350 million – People on Facebook
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009)
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009)
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009)
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA)
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA)
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA)
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.