DMN3 Blog

If you want a peek of what happened with the Internet in 2010, here are the numbers. You should be prepared to be astounded.

Pingdom, a Swedish website and server Internet monitoring company, recently compiled and published a view of Internet Activities for 2010. They used a wide variety of sources to put the numbers together.

Many online marketing professionals like to cite numbers to impress their clients or bosses on the vast potential of the Internet and how it can be used for marketing and advertising purposes. Now you have more ammunition.

Consider these Internet user activities:

Email:

• In 2010, the number of emails sent on the Internet was approximately 107 trillion
• That amounts to 294 billion emails sent daily by 1.88 billion email users worldwide
• Approximately 9 out of 10 emails are spam
• There are approximately 2.9 billion email accounts worldwide with 25% of them being corporate in nature

Websites/Domains:

• As of December of 2010, there were 255 million websites, with 21.4 million added in 2010 alone
• The number of top-level domain names as of October 2010 stood at 202 million, a 7% increase from the previous year
• There are currently 256 domain name extensions including country extensions
• The top three domain name extensions at the end of 2010 were .COM with 88.8 million; .NET with 13.2 million; and .ORG with 8.6 million

Internet Users:

• As of June 2010, there were approximately 1.97 billion users of the Internet worldwide, an increase of 14% from the previous year
• Asia as a region had the most with an estimated 825.1 million Internet users
• North America had an estimated 266.2 million Internet users

Social Media:

• At the conclusion of 2010, there were an estimated 600 million people on Facebook with 250 million of them added in 2010 alone
• 70% percent of Facebook users are located outside of the United States
• The sharing of content (links, status, photos, etc) on Facebook alone is currently estimated at 30 billion items per month
• There were an estimated 175 million users of Twitter as of September, 2010, with 100 million new accounts added in 2010
• Those Twitter users sent 25 billion tweets in 2010
• Twitter ’s most followed user is Lady Gaga with 7.7 million followers

Online Video and Images:

• Two billion videos are watched each day on YouTube, with 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 84% of United States’ Internet users view videos online with 14% having uploaded videos online
• As of September, 2010, Flickr hosted 5 billion images with over 3,000 photos uploaded every minute
• It is now estimated that over 3 billion images are uploaded per month to Facebook

While it is difficult to get one’s mind around these kind of numbers, one can comprehend that the Internet is a vast network of applications and users.

It takes savvy marketers to reach the many segments of Internet users with their online marketing and advertising messages. At least you know you don’t need to convert many Internet users to create a huge financial bonanza.

For all the numbers revolving around Internet activities, you can go to Pingdom’s blog post on the subject here: Internet 2010 in Numbers.