Internet 2009 in numbers

Posted in Tech blog on January 22nd, 2010 by Pingdom

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

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. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Enjoy!

Also check out our Internet 2012 in numbers article!

Email

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

Websites

234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
-22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
-72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Web server market share

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.

Internet users by region

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.

Web browsers

Web browser market share

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.

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. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

More reading:
Internet 2010 in numbers

Tags: 2009, blogging, browser, chart, email, graph, internet, online, online video, social, spam, statistics, summary, trends, video, web, web browsing, webserver, websites

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78 comments

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maxmate

very helpful information.

Taran

WOW,

These stats are so interesting.Great work.

Marc

keep forgetting that Asia is so massive online. Hard to track those markets. There is much to gain.Thanks Marc.

natassia

wow

juliet

would also be interested to see how 2009 compared with 2008 - these are great numbers (and very nice presentation) - but what is the percentage growth over 2008?

Does this mean the market shrank, or it grew 22.1% less while maintaining market share. Ditto other servers Confusing stats.

William Alicea

I am amazed at the stats with all that is going on in today's techology. If it's like this in the year 2010, imagine what it's going to be like in the next 5-10 years. Go technology!!!

62.7% of Internet Explorer is made up of versions 6,7 and 8. Nothing against it but people should be moving to version 8 as soon as possible. Nice article by the way.

Jefftoch Adam

What are excellent collections on the internet information? Here have a lot of important information. Nice work, Thanks` a lot…..

Mark Boyle

Is there also information about digital agenda users? What is the most used digital agenda? How many people use a digital agenda?

Artush

62.7 IE? I don't think so

Todayer

Thank for research)

John

WOw this data is really good. And it clearly gives reasons why youtube is youtube. this data is really precious to me and i am bookmarking it. Hope to find latest data. i was infact googling internet users stat and landed over here.

OLC Yurtdisi Egitim - Alex

Very interesting and useful report on internet stats. I wonder how it is being calculated. Based upon search engine statistics probably? Another thing is the number of internet users in Australia/Oceania. Australia and New Zealand's population is about 27 million. And there are 21 million internet users. Seems like everyone has a keyboard under their fingers :)... Europe's population is about 825 million. And internet users are nearly half...

اعلانات مبوبه

Amazing numbers! Internet is so big! Social media is growing fast, because the smartphone are getting used more often.

Goedkope Tuinhuisjes

Whow, keep forgetting that Asia is so massive online. Hard to track those markets. There is much to gain.

Barry Dennis

As a marketer, all those stats make me salivate. Done correctly, I still believe the Internet is the best marketing game in town, notwithstanding the 4,000,000,000 who don't have it. In my view the Internet of the (near) future encompasses the aggregation of all the marketing channels to some degree.

Evan Perera

Hey may I quote some of the insight here in this blog if I provide a link back to your site?

Pingdom

@Evan Sure, just link back to us.

Webstandard-Blog

90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009! Incredible those numbers. Thx for sharing those informations about "Internet 2009 in numbers"!

Website Design

Very interesting stats! It's going to be interesting to see stats on social growth next year... thanks for sharing

Mark Jensen

Amazing numbers! Internet is so big! Social media is growing fast, because the smartphone are getting used more often.

Tiprox

Massive numbers! Very curious for the 2010 figures. It's all about the figures ;-)

Nazim

cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow unbelievable data

nrdufour

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/01/overallc.png <-- yeah IIS did loose 20% or so in 2009 ... interesting to see that apache was at its peak in 2005 too!

Vikas Gupta

Awesome effort! Thanks a lot.

feeder goldfish

Fascinating stats! But, I'm not sure how you'd know "the percentage of emails that were spam". I'm thinking of all those folks who still wade through stuff and people forced to create filters in their mail client for stuff that slips through their ISP. Sadly, that means the number is probably higher than 81%.

Sam

16% follow Ashton Kutcher? That's too many.

Prox

Nice info ! about 140k new zombie computers ! Oh my God ... It will be new spam fabrics -.-`

Dina

57% – Twitter’s user base in the US - this is something to think about for brands using twitter for local promotions. (outside the US). would like to see the breakdown for other countries.

Pingdom

@Dina: You can find a breakdown in this article over at GigaOM, from November: http://gigaom.com/2009/11/10/twitter-valuation/ For example, second largest is the UK with 8.2% of Twitter's user base, then Canada with 5.9%, etc.

ablufia

@Ebun - we'll never know ! :)

tika

this is truly amazing statistics! who knew there were so many emails sent out in one year!!!!

Anthony

great stats! thanks for sharing these in one spot. Would also be great to see comparisons to 2009 either next to the statistics or one click away.

Steven

Indeed. So... why don't you have any POPs in Asia?

Bruce T

Loved the Stats.

Marah Marie

Useful, interesting stats (the amount of spam is simply unbelievable/gone out-of-control). Thanks for bringing these facts to everyone's attention.

Victor Chan

Thanks for gathering all the stats. I wonder how the Twitter community can even digest 27.3 million tweets in a day. Victor

Rag

The carbon footprint of spam email can be phenomenal. At 81%, that is 72.9 trillion emails. To store/forward/transmit such a vast amount of email may take huge amount of infrastructure that consumes lot of power. All this is to send the emails to the junk folder where they are never opened. Something must be done to address this than just filtering, which doesn't address the real problem.

Alex

234 million websites? 126 million blogs means only 108 million non-blog websites? Sounds low. I'm not saying it's wrong...it probably isn't, it just surprised me. I thought the number would be higher.

"1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide." Is this the amount of email acc. on the Internet? Or active users? Because I have like 20+ emails.. ~ Good overview

Andrei

wow just think what the stats will show in 10 year. I bet at least 5 billion internet users

Mark Pack

Great collection of stats; thanks. One quibble: it's 4.25 million Twitter accounts, and not "People" following @aplusk, and I suspect there's quite a difference between the "accounts" and "people" thanks to spam, bots et al.

Pingdom

@Mark Pack: Fair point. We simplified. ;)

Shashikiran Srinivasa

Wow! Amazing

Big Fsh

Wow 2010's gonna be fun

Tanya Hall

Excellent stats, would be good to compare to what happens in the wide web world this year!

Nic Soto

Great snapshot! Wow, when you look at those enormous numbers... Kinda takes you back for a moment. It's amazing to see the number of people who use the Internet in one fashion or another. Thank you for gathering this and sharing!

internetual

excellent article and stats, thanks

Mn9or

interesting information specially the spam :| thanks a lot

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