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