When you arrive at a site that asks you to register for an account before you can access certain content or functionality, does that drive you away?

A recent research report shows that a site that requires users to register does just that, drives users away. On the flipside, the same report shows that about half of all users are attracted by personalization capabilities on a site.

So, on the one hand, we don’t want to register but, on the other, we want personalization.

How can you deal with that in a way that finds a balance between the two? Perhaps social login is the answer.

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Every single day – well, except the weekend – we’re giving away a 1-year Basic Account package, worth almost $120.

This promotion continues and one lucky person every day has a chance to walk away with this catch.

What we do is that each day, at a different time each day, we post a message to one of our social media accounts – Facebook, Google+, or Twitter – with a link containing a discount code.

The code entitles the first person that applies it to a transaction to a 100% discount on a 1-year Basic Package, worth $119.40.

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So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

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There are millions upon millions of blogs available today, and many of them are hosted on dedicated blogging services. These kinds of services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for WordPress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr.

One of the main benefits of using a blogging service is that they make blogging easy. There’s no need to deal with traditional hosting. You blog, the blogging service keeps your content available online.

In theory, blogging services should also be able to make your blog more reliable since they have a lot of servers at their disposal, often spread across multiple data centers. If your blog gets flooded by traffic (usually a good thing), a blogging service has a much better chance handling it since your traffic is just a drop in the ocean for them. Had you been on a single server (or even a shared one), your site might not have coped.

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And now for something short and sweet, or bittersweet if you worked at MySpace back in 2006-2007 when the social network was still going strong.

To say that Facebook stole MySpace’s thunder in those years is probably the understatement of the decade. By the end of 2008, the social media focus (and mindshare) had already shifted away from MySpace to Facebook in a massive fashion. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a chart.

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Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

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At the recent F8 conference Facebook revealed that they now have 800 million active users. Europe, with Russia included, has a population of 727 million. We now have a social network that is so large that it could fill up a major world region with people and still have some to spare (this “spare” being twice the size of Canada’s entire population).

Another cool comparison is that Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

For fun, here are some other size comparisons you can make.

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The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you want to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

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It’s always interesting when Google decides to push something on their main property, the Google search page. Considering how ubiquitous Google is, this is such a power move.

What we mean is that no other company can cast its net this wide by just modifying its home page. We all use Google. It’s like your TV remote suddenly coming alive and telling you that yeah, you should check out that Google+ thing.

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Back in June, Google+ landed with splash in the social network swimming pool, spraying water right in Facebook’s eyes. Judging by the mostly positive buzz so far, it’s arguably one of Google’s most successful product launches ever.

We know there are plenty of early adopters and techies on Google+, mostly males (the term “sausage fest” has been thrown around). But where has Google+ captured the imagination of people the most? Where are people the most interested in this new social network?

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