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Internet 2010 in numbers

Posted in Main on January 12th, 2011 by Pingdom

Internet 2010 in numbers

What happened with the Internet in 2010?

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, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.

We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. You can find the full list of source references at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get you even more numbers to chew on.

Prepare for a good kind of information overload. ;)

Email

  • 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
  • 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
  • 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
  • 480 million – New email users since the year before.
  • 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
  • 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
  • 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
  • 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

Websites

  • 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
  • 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

Web servers

  • 39.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2010.
  • 15.3% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2010.
  • 4.1% – Growth in the number of nginx websites in 2010.
  • 5.8% – Growth in the number of Google GWS websites in 2010.
  • 55.7% – Growth in the number of Lighttpd websites in 2010.

Web server market share

Domain names

  • 88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
  • 13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
  • 8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
  • 79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
  • 202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).
  • 7% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

  • 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
  • 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
  • 825.1 million – Internet users in Asia.
  • 475.1 million – Internet users in Europe.
  • 266.2 million – Internet users in North America.
  • 204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
  • 110.9 million – Internet users in Africa.
  • 63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
  • 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

  • 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
  • 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
  • 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
  • 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
  • 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
  • 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
  • 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
  • 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
  • 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
  • 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Web browsers

Web browser market share

Videos

  • 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
  • 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
  • 186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
  • 84% – Share of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
  • 14% – Share of Internet users that have uploaded videos online (USA).
  • 2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
  • 20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.

Images

  • 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
  • 3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
  • 130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
  • 3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
  • 36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Data sources and notes: Spam percentage from MessageLabs (PDF). Email user numbers and counts from Radicati Group (the number of sent emails was their prediction for 2010, so it’s very much an estimate). Website numbers from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user numbers and distribution from Internet World Stats. Facebook stats from Facebook and Business Insider. Twitter stats from Twitter (and here), TwitterCounter and TechCrunch. Web browser stats from StatCounter. YouTube video numbers from Google. Facebook video numbers from GigaOM. US online video stats from Comscore and the Pew Research Center. Flickr image numbers from Flickr. Facebook image numbers from this blog.

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“25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010″
I don’t think 25 million tweets is correct as there are 50 million tweets sent every day :)

@Siem: Look at your own quote… 25 BILLION, not million. ;)

great breakdown of data. so is this a problem that we’re facing? if so any suggestions how we, end users, can help?

How many spams per year？

262 billion spam a day?

There is a great saying “Never believe statistics unless you falsified them yourself”. Even if these figures are accurate (and I am not debating that point), the relevance and impact of these figures would be much better if they could drill down a bit further (e.g. how much of the “social notworking” was done during business hours versus “social networking”.)

The impact of the Internet on our lives is truly profound, but how much and where has it improved our lives and society and where has it harmed us. These would be the statistics that are interesting to me. (e.g. of the 25 billion tweets, how many were personal, business, marketing hype, and spam?)

According to this stat Flikr is still leading photo sharing service ? I thought Facebook is first

Stat look interesting. About 50% in web are asian, so…. make web sites but for china and india, not in english :)

Wow… Chrome did good business… When they introduced their first browser again? No surprise to me, Chrome rocks!!

fix : 55.7% – Growth in the number of Lighttpd websites in 2010.

Can I translate this post into Brazilian Portuguese and post it in my blog?

What are your trillions and billions – US or Europan? (10^18 or 10^12)?

Eduard,

there are many websites in Chinese language, the most popular language in the internet is English, but Chinese is on second place, just check this chart http://russiansphinx.blogspot.com/2011/01/place-of-russian-language-in-internet.html

@Steve: We use the meaning that’s most common in contemporary English, i.e. billion is 10^9 and trillion is 10^12. Hope that helps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion

Are there any internet users in South America?!

Actually, ignore that, my mistake!

Thank You For Sharing World’s Biggest Data.
I Realy Like This Post And Today I Will Sharing Your Post Link On My Blog.
It Is Realy Cool Info.
Thank You.
Thank You.
Thank You.

50 million multiplied by 365 days = 18.25 billion…

Quote

Siem
January 12th, 2011 at 2:34 pm

“25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010″
I don’t think 25 million tweets is correct as there are 50 million tweets sent every day

@Noel: 50 million tweets per day that Siem mentioned is an old number. Twitter has grown throughout the year.

88% of statistics are false.

And if we consider that in China YouTube is now really accessible, but they have theirs own “youku” and “tudou” and the Chinese are big fans of movies… I do not want to know the actual number of uploaded movies.

Hello,

Would you be able to break any of these figures down to regional areas? If so, how about Leeds or Yorkshire in the UK?

Social “notworking”, that’s a good one James! Just happens to be what I’m doing now. Thanks for the reality check.

kd Orkut? Brazil is one of the fastest growing countries the number of User in the world and is now talking about the USA!

480 million – New email users since the year before.

^is that new email accounts?

I had no idea that the U.S was the one with the lowest web users. I guess it makes sense since there’s a billion people in Asia and I don’t know how many in Europe.

Cool facts though!

I can use these numbers for sure.

wow.. amazing.. Its been calculated.. How about our breath everyday.. anyone can take some calculation..

I hadn’t looked at stats since 2005 and the changes are immense in comparison in 2010. Social media and videos are taking a much higher proportion of internet time and space. There is no doubt the internet is here to stay.

Another interesting observation is the dominance of Internet Explorer has diminished to around 50 percent. About 10 years ago it was 90 percent of the market.

Thanks so much for pulling these stats together and sharing!

We loved them so much we actually made a video about them to help educate our clients about how important the internet is and why they need an online presence. It was way too long though (almost 5 minutes) so we had to cull a lot of the Facebook and Twitter stuff out to get it back to about 2-3 minutes.

You can check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XyWTGepCHo

@Bianca: Very nice! Some of the numbers seem to be from 2009, though?

@Mona Nomura: Based on the numbers from Radicati Group, it’s new email users.

Is it possible to get the entire break down? Maybe in terms of country of continents, but a bit more detailed. I’d appreciate since I run an email marketing firm in Kenya, E Africa

Thank you for the rehash.

Just wondering what the number of new Domain names in 2010 was?

Thank you in advance.

Internet has changed the way we learn, live and play. The numbers represented here clearly validate this. This trend will continue for months and years to come. It’ll soon be unimaginable to live even a day without the Internet, just as electricity and telephone was thought of a few years ago.

Very interesting statistics. May be they are the most important for international companies I suppose!

@Rick McKnight: From October 2009 to October 2010, the number of registered domain names across all top-level domains increased by roughly 13 million.

phillip wood,

I was able to find more detailed data only for FACEBOOK in UK and also in the Netherlands (Facebook usage by city)

http://russiansphinx.blogspot.com/p/facebook-usage-by-city.html

I have never seen other detailed data for example internet usage by city :( so I can not help

James has raised a few of very interesting points (see a very early comment) but I guess the questions need a completely different way of measuring, quantitative vs qualitative approaches don’t always work that well. A very good post and thanks for sharing it!

Very interesting numbers. They show why brands enter so massive in social media.

I’d love to see the stats on text messages or bbm’s sent…i’d bet they’d outnumber emails.

Very interesting, it seems as the Internet grows, the quality of its ‘median’ information must gradually be declining

@Jon including that one “88% of statistics are false.” but I love it.

Wow, a lot of numbers. I never thought that are so many sites. can be calculated only on certain countries?

I wonder how many sites are mobile?

Whether it’s all correct or not it’s still interesting to see what aspects of the digital age users/businesses are attempting to follow/monitor.

Great post, regardless of how accurate the statistics really are precisely.

Is there any detailed info specifically focused on The Netherlands available at one of the original sources used?

Regardless of the discussion about figures being 100% correct or a little up/down, its a fact that internet is getting more and more into our lives and it is not restricted to the developed world only, it is changing life style of people in developing countries also. Putting these numbers in one post here is a great effort overall.

Internet Explorer is shrinking – 2-3 more years and FF will be the 1st :)

There sure has been an explosive growth with photos and video each gaining 1 billion uploads. That’s huge! Thanks for sharing this.

North America makes up 13.5% of internet users. What percent of online shopping is from North America?

Do you have any data from past years 2009 or 2008 to compare the information? Thanks for your help! Excelent work!

As Iria, i would like to compare these data with previous years.
Thanks

Thanks for sharing.
you mentioned the 30billion content pieces are shared on Facebook per month.
Does this include status updates, chats and private messages?

Facebook publishes a much higher number for chats and p2p messages only:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-underlying-technology-of-messages/454991608919

@Shaial: Here’s the full quote from Facebook’s own stats page: “More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.”

Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

The relevant quote in your link would indicate that they definitely didn’t include Facebook’s chat in those numbers (120 billion msgs per month), and maybe not person-to-person messages either (15 billion per month) although that last number does fit within the 30 billion number.

Here’s the quote: “The current Messages infrastructure handles over 350 million users sending over 15 billion person-to-person messages per month. Our chat service supports over 300 million users who send over 120 billion messages per month.”

Source: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-underlying-technology-of-messages/454991608919

(Nice find, btw! The Facebook engineering blog often has very interesting tidbits of information if you look closely. Thanks for sharing.)

In the US?

@jordan: 1 billion SMS sent per day in France only (source: regulatory body http://www.arcep.fr/index.php?id=10743) So it could be inferred these outnumber “non-spam” emails.

INSANITY!
over 20 million photos upload on facebook everyday!
why people have so much off time, i wonder?

Amazing stats, its time for the digital revolution, everyone as individuals, brands, companies, groups, should be aware of the online presence & it can affect them

@Pingdom: Is this right? Comparing the email traffic back in 2008 and 2009, by end of 2010 email has grown by 30T and spam has grown by 42T. Does this mean that real email has reduced by 12T??

How is it possible that the Internet Users counted in this stat are 1.97 billion if the world population is 6.891.000.000?

@Ellie: Because not everyone has Internet access? ;)

Awesome aggregation of figures in one place. I was just wondering, if and how these figures could lead to an impact on the nascent business of IPV6?
For example, if there are 255 million websites – migrating them to V6, would be huge opportunity. Would love some stats/pieces of info co-relating the figures into unique V6 migration challenge and/or opportunity, depending on how one looks at it.

thanks

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What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

Read more

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Posted in Main on February 17th, 2012 by Pingdom

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Posted in Main on February 16th, 2012 by Pingdom

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