It's hard to believe that just over 20 years ago, less than 1% of the world's population had an internet connection. Here's some fascinating statistics showing just important and ubiquitous the internet has become in the last two decades.
The number of internet users globally reached a billion in 2005, 2 billion in 2010 and three billion in 2013, Today more than 3.5 billion people now have an internet connection - around 40% of the world's population.
The country with the highest number of internet users is China (721,434,547), followed by India (462,124,989) and then the U.S. (286,942,362). It was only a few years ago the USA had the highest number of users.
In Australia, 20,679,490 people access the Internet at home, via any device type and connection.
In terms of penetration, Iceland leads the way at 100%, followed by the Faeroe Islands at 98.5% and Norway at 98%. Australia ranks 32nd at 85.1%.
Some more quick internet statistics for the year to date:
- 1.112 billion active web sites
- 75.67 *trillion* emails have been sent
- 1.643 *trillion* Google searches carried out
- 3 trillion videos viewed on YouTube
- 1.77 billion active Facebook users
- 212.4 billion tweets so far this year
- 21.5 billion photos have been uploaded to Instagram
- 1.141 trillion gigabytes of internet traffic this year
All this internet use is requiring a lot of energy - approximately 1,094,568,170MWh of electricity has been consumed so far this year globally in keeping us all connected.
This activity has a significant carbon footprint. In 2016 so far, an estimated 838,601 tons of carbon emissions are attributed to internet use.
You can view these and other statistics updating in real time on Internet Live Stats - but beware, watching the numbers tick over can be a bit hypnotic.
ILS retrieves data from over 250 official sources and then uses an advanced algorithm to generate statistics that update in real time.
Trivia: Spam accounts for 86 percent of the world's e-mail traffic, with around 400 billion such messages sent each day.
Image Credit: BigStock
