The Internet is a massive series of tubes network that we often take for granted in our everyday lives. It’s not often that we get to see just how big this network really is, but a new report gives us a nice overview.
Pingdom, a Web site monitoring company, has collected a number of statistics that shows just how big the Internet was in 2012. There’s a lot of information here so we can’t obviously share it all, but here’s some of the more impressive numbers that illustrate just how truly massive the Internet is.
2.2 billion – Number of email users worldwide.
144 billion – Total email traffic per day worldwide.
61% – Share of emails that were considered non-essential.
87.8 million – Number of Tumblr blogs.
17.8 billion – Number of page views for Tumblr.
59.4 million – Number of WordPress sites around the world.
3.5 billion – Number of webpages run by WordPress viewed each month.
37 billion – Number of pageviews for Reddit.com in 2012.
246 million – Number of domain name registrations across all top-level domains.
100 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2012.
14.1 million – Number of .net domain names at the end of 2012.
9.7 million – Number of .org domain names at the end of 2012.
6.7 million – Number of .info domain names at the end of 2012.
2.2 million – Number of .biz domain names at the end of 2012.
2.4 billion – Number of Internet users worldwide.
1.1 billion – Number of Internet users in Asia.
519 million – Number of Internet users in Europe.
274 million – Number of Internet users in North America.
255 million – Number of Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
167 million – Number of Internet users in Africa.
90 million – Number of Internet users in the Middle East.
24.3 million – Number of Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
565 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
1.2 trillion – Number of searches on Google in 2012.
1.1 billion – Number of global smartphone subscribers.
7 petabytes – How much photo content Facebook added every month.
300 million – Number of new photos added every day to Facebook.
5 billion – The total number of photos uploaded to Instagram since its start, reached in September 2012.
58 – Number of photos uploaded every second to Instagram.
This is just a small sampling, but it should give you an idea of just how massive the Internet has become since its official creation more than 20 years ago. It’s absolutely ming boggling to think that the Internet will become even larger thanks to the formal introduction of IPv6 last year.
As the Internet grows, it’s only going to become more chaotic and even more impervious to regulation. Despite the Internet serving as a breeding ground for the worst humanity has to offer, it also serves as a platform for the best as well by pushing innovation that would otherwise be impossible without it.
All of this is to say that the Internet is something worth protecting as we head into a new year full of threats to the sanctity and independence of this most wonderful invention.
