(ALMOST) 2 BILLION AND STILL GOING UP!

Holy Internet Batman!

In January 2009 I wrote an article titled "1.5 Billion Internet Users…and Growing", exploring the incredible development of the use of the web in recent years. I just happened to be (web) surfing this morning when I decided to visit the authority on Internet statistics, Internet World Stats...

...almost 2 BILLION! We'll perhaps a slight exaggeration. The numbers at the end of 2009, a mere 11 months after I wrote my last were 1,802,330,457. That's an increase of 400,000,000 users, or 26% of the world's population.

In North America, the US is way out front in terms of number of users (220 million) but in percentages, it's behind Greenland (90% but only 57,600 population). Canada has a 75% penetration which translates to 28 million users.

Asia still lags behind with 20% of the population having Internet access, but that's an increase of 250 million people, almost as much as the entire North American continent. That number is primarily comprised of Chinese web users (384 million or 28% of the population), followed by Japan with 75% (96 million) of the population and India a close third with only 7% but 81 million users.

In Europe, the top three countries, number-of-Internet-users wise are Germany (54 million), the UK (47 million) and Russia (43 million). However, on the percentage scale, the leader is Iceland (93%), Norway (91%), and Sweden (89%).

Netcraft's 2010 survey of websites reports that 207 million websites responded to their tests. Remember that these include sites such as Wordpress which have "sub sites" below them, but this is still an increase of 20 million since my January post (187).

I could go on and on. Take a moment to check out the numbers for yourself. In conclusion, what this all means is that over a quarter of the planet is wired to the web. From an e-marketing and e-business standpoint, that's an incredible ocean in which to go fishing and all indications are that the numbers are going to continue to go up. The ratio of users to websites is going up, which I guess is good for those of us who have sites, there are more users to go around.

Can't wait to see how this all looks in another 12 to 18 months. Isn't the World Wide Web an amazing place?

Reference sources
Internet World Stats at www.internetworldstats.com
Netcraft at www.netcraft.com