I continue to be amazed at the growing number of Internet users. As of December the number of Internet users has surpassed one billion, and some believe that the actual number might be higher than that. While impressive it’s expected that this number will significantly increase since only 18% of the world’s population currently has Internet service. Watch for growth in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America which are expected to garner most of this increase.
While the numbers aren’t exact, it’s estimated that there are at least 100 million web sites and 15 – 30 billion web pages in existence today. In addition, here is some very interesting information about email:
• 1.3 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 210 billion – The number of emails sent per day in 2008.
• 70% – The percentage of emails that are spam.
• 53.8 trillion – The number of spam emails sent in 2008 (assuming 70% are spam). (http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/01/22/internet-2008-in-numbers/)
And yet, there’s plenty of room for growth.
Perhaps you wouldn’t be surprised at this, but China has the highest number of Internet users with more than 253,000,000 users. The U.S is second, with 220,141,969. The remaining top five are: Japan - 94,000,000; India, 60,000,000; and Germany with 52,533,914 users.
The above stats are just the tip of the iceberg about where the Internet is headed. I honestly believe we’re in for quite an exciting ride.
