Internet 2008 in numbers
What happened with the Internet in 2008?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many blog posts were published? This post will answer those questions and many others with more interesting statistics than you can shake a stick at. 
We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. In some of the cases we here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to play around with.
- 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).
Websites
- 186,727,854 – The number of websites on the Internet in December 2008.
- 31.5 million – The number of websites added during 2008.
Web servers
- 24.4% – The growth of Apache websites in 2008.
- 13.7% – The growth of IIS websites in 2008.
- 22.2% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2008.
- 336.8% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2008.
- 100.3% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2008.
Domain names
- 77.5 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2008.
- 11.8 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2008.
- 7.2 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2008.
- 174 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains.
- 19% – The increase in the number of domain names in 2008.
Internet users
- 1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).
- 578,538,257 – Internet users in Asia.
- 384,633,765 – Internet users in Europe.
- 248,241,969 – Internet users in North America.
- 139,009,209 – Internet users in Latin America/Caribbean.
- 51,065,630 – Internet users in Africa.
- 41,939,200 – Internet users in the Middle East.
- 20,204,331 – Internet users in Oceania/Australia.
Blogs
- 133 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by Technorati).
- 900,000 – The number of new blog posts in a day.
- 329 million – The number of blog posts in 2008.
Images
- 10 billion – Photos hosted by Facebook (October 2008).
- 3 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (November 2008).
- 6.2 billion – Photos hosted by Photobucket (October 2008).
Videos
- 12.7 billion – The number of online videos watched by American Internet users in a month (November 2008).
- 87 – The number of online videos viewed per month per Internet user in USA.
- 34% – The increase in viewing of online video in USA compared to 2007.
- 3.1 – The number of minutes of an average online video.
Web browsers
Malicious software
- 1 million – The number of computer viruses in April 2008.
- 468% – The increase in malicious code compared to 2007.
Data sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Blog stats from Technorati. Email stats from Radicati Group via About.com. Spam stats from DCC. Virus stats from Symantec via Times Online. Online video stats from Comscore. Photo stats from CNET and Flickr.
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Train Pictures
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 am
Wow, that’s some big numbers. You can tell the Internet is growing to be a powerful force in the future.
Stormy
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Excellent post! Great job pulling all this data together.
Interesting that North America only has 17% of the world’s internet population. I had no idea.
Rajesh V Gheware
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Wow! Good to see data together and with data sources as well
Dedy
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:39 am
great info. wish to have per country statistics. anyway, thanks and appreciate the effort!
Danny
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
The real question, what software do you use to make those charts?
Antiq
January 24th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
The same question as Danny
What software?
Pingdom
January 26th, 2009 at 4:42 am
Thank you for the comments so far!
@Danny and Antiq: Glad you like the charts. We use a product called Swiff Chart for them:
http://www.globfx.com/products/swfchart/
Héctor Tamayo
January 26th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Hi,
These data are very interesting and usefull. I have a little question: When you said “Billion”, do you mean 1.000.000.000 (one million of millions) ?? or just 1000.000.000 (one thousand of millons).
I’m asking because i’m from Colombia and here, the “Billion” is a BIG number equal to 1.000.000.000 (one million of millions)
Thanks
Pingdom
January 26th, 2009 at 8:56 am
@Héctor:
With a “billion” we mean “one thousand millions”. 1,000,000,000. Think “giga”
Leo James
January 26th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
handy information great .. stumbled!
Smart one
January 26th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
The email numbers sounds unrealistic
210 billion emails sent per day and 70% of it is spam, which means that 30% of 210 = 63 billion are genuine emails.
Dividing 63 billion emails by 1.3 billion email users = 48.61
I find it hard to believe that on an average an email user sends 48.61 emails every day.
kevin
January 29th, 2009 at 1:36 am
Check out this same content where I have posted :
http://www.wikiplugs.com/story.php?title=internet-2008-in-numbers
thanks
iGuide
January 30th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Might be a good idea to make sure your websites grow by at least 20-25% a year to keep pace!
Mataram
February 10th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Would you like to inform me what is the most bandwidth measurement site used on the web. Thanks in advance. Mataram
Jonas
February 25th, 2009 at 8:13 am
well its pretty obvious to me that n.america only has 17%
it’s basically only 2 countries (ish)
EU is not fully united yet so each “State” has its own market and fundings for “broadband broadening”. which leads to better availability, both in cities and on the countryside..
asia is just obviously huge
Stewart Engelman Domain Sales
July 31st, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Alot of amazing statistics. Except the stats on malware make me sick. Not so much the absolute volume, but the growth rate. Sadly, the virus-writing community is becoming very sophisticated, in some cases dropping payloads that disable your A/V software before doing actual damage to your system, making them very powerful and hard to block. Even if your A/V software has the malware identified in its most recent virus definition file, it has no value unless the A/V background service is actually running.