In 2012, roughly 2.4 billion people worldwide used the Web, recording some 2.7 billion Facebook likes and 175 million tweets per day, according to a report by Pingdom, which compiled a year of data on the Internet, email, and social media.
Some key worldwide findings for 2012:
- 144 billion emails were sent per day during the year, of which 68.8% were spam.
- 43% of the top 1 million websites were hosted in the US.
- 48% of the top 100 blogs were published via WordPress.
- The market share of GoDaddy.com, the biggest domain name registrar in the world was 32.4%.
- 4 billion hours of video was viewed via YouTube each month.
- 7 PBs (petabytes, or 10 to the 15th power) of photo content was added to Facebook every month.
Below, additional finding form Pingdom's report, based on data from a wide range of sources, including Internet World Stats, StatCounter, Verisign, Facebook, and Twitter.
As of June 30, 2012, Asia accounted for the plurality (44.8%) of the world's Internet population; Europe followed with 21.6% and North America with 11.4%:
The populations of Internet users across the world (amounting to 2.4 billion users) were as follows:
- Asia: 1.1 billion Internet users
- Europe: 519 million
- North America: 274 million
- Latin America / Caribbean: 255 million
- Africa: 167 million
- Middle East: 90 million
- Oceania/Australia: 24.3 million
China had 565 million Internet users—more than any other country in the world. China's Internet penetration (among its total population) was roughly 42% in mid-2012.
World Internet Penetration
The penetration of Internet users among a population tells a slightly different story than user counts.
North America had the highest Internet penetration as of June, at 78.6%, followed by Oceana/Australia (67.6%) and Europe (63.2%).
Domain Names
Below, are stats on Web domains as of December 2012, from Verisign:
- Number of domain name registrations across all top-level domains: 246 million
- Number of country code top-level domain name registrations: 104.9 million
- Number of .com domain names: 100 million
- Number of .net domain names: 14.1 million
- Number of .org domain names: 9.7 million
- Number of .info domain names: 6.7 million
- Number of .biz domain names: 2.2 million
Websites
The report also compiled website stats from various data providers:
- Total number of websites as of December: 634 million
- Number of websites added in 2012: 52 million
- Share of the top 1 million websites hosted in the US: 43%
- Share of the top 100 blogs powered by WordPress: 48%
- Share of the top 10,000 websites served by open source software: 75%
- Total number of Tumblr blogs: 87.8 million
- Total number of Wordpress blogs: 60.7 million
Email findings for the full year of 2012 were provided by the Radicati Group, a tech market research firm:
- Number of email users worldwide: 2.2 billion
- Total email traffic per day worldwide: 144 billion messages
- Number of email clients worldwide: 4.3 billion
Other email stats, from various sources:
- Number of active Gmail users globally, making it the leading email provider worldwide: 425 million.
- Usage share of iOS, the most popular email client: 35.6%
Social Media
The report also compiled user stats and engagement metrics for Facebook and Twitter in 2012, from various sources.
Facebook stats:
- Number of monthly posts by Facebook Pages in Brazil, making it the most active country on Facebook: 85,962
- Number of monthly active users on Facebook, surpassed in October: 1 billion
- Percentage of Facebook users who are woman: 47%
- Average age of a Facebook user: 40.5
- Number of likes posted on Facebook every day: 2.7 billion
- Share of the top 10,000 websites integrated with Facebook: 24.3%
Twitter stats:
- Monthly active users on Twitter, surpassed in December: 200 million
- Average number of tweets sent every day during 2012: 175 million
- Average age of a Twitter user: 37.3
- Average number of total tweets per user: 307
- Average number of followers per Twitter user: 51
- Number of heads of state with a Twtter account: 123
- Number of retweets of Barack Obama's tweet:"Four more years," the most retweets ever: 819,000+
- Number of tweets during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics: 9.66 million
Other social media stats:
- Number of members on LinkedIn (as of September): 187 million
- Average age of a LinkedIn user: 44.2
- Number of monthly active users on Google+: 135 million
- How many times per day the +1 button on Google+ is used: 5 billion
Read the full post for other data on Web browsers, search, mobile technology, video, and image content.
