The Internet in 2010

Tags

blog stats, email stats, facebook users, internet stats, number of websites, science, size of the internet, skeptic, twitter users

According to Pingdom (a website monitoring service), there were 107 trillion emails sent last year! Being of the internet generation, I always knew that the internet was something that was incredibly vast. It is a place that has endless expanses of information and accessibility jostling with undocumented caverns of pornography; a place that convinced us (me at least) if you didn’t find what you were looking for on the internet, it probably does not exist.

While most of us already knew of the internet’s prowess in terms of sheer scope and breadth, it becomes even more interesting when we have some data to play around with. Using this data perhaps we can gain a little perspective on this behemoth. Below are 2010′s stats for blogs, Facebook, Twitter, websites, emails, and users.

STATA! (Stats and Data) [copyright!]

First of all, let’s deal with that huge email statistic of 107 trillion emails sent last year.

Perspective:

Let’s now say that most of these emails were somewhat short and to-the-point, as they often are, and it only took you 1 minute to read each one. The time it would take you to read just 1 year’s worth of emails (though the number of yearly emails is sure to increase) would be 200 MILLION YEARS! In this time frame, you could witness the entire evolution, rein, and downfall of all dinosaurs while you read your emails.

What about if all those emails were made physical… Taking the average length of a commercially available envelope to be 6 inches, if we laid all of that mail end to end the result would be 10 BILLION MILES LONG! That’s only two orders of magnitude away from a light year (about 5 trillion miles).

With this enormous distance, we could make a paper trail that would stretch to the SUN and back 55 times!

And now for some more general internet STATA:

INTERNET USERS:

As of June 2010, there were 1.97 billion Internet users:

825.1 million in Asia
475.1 million in Europe
266.2 million in North America
204.7 million in Latin America and the Caribbean
110.9 million in Africa
63.2 million in the Middle East
21.3 million in Oceania and Australia

EMAIL:

An average of 294 billion email messages from an estimated 2.9 billion email accounts worldwide were sent per day and about 89 percent were spam. That is like getting only one important letter in a heap of junk mail…that sounds about right. But in this case, 265 billion emails per day were sent directly to the “bulk mail” folder.

BLOGS:

152 million blogs were estimated (that makes me feel tiny!).

THE INTERNET AT LARGE:

An Approximated Partial Map of the Internet: each of the endpoints for each line is a website (click to enlarge)

Again according to Pingdom, the total number of websites is 255 million, which is an increase of 21.4 million over the previous year. I wonder how much of that is taken up by a website made for every single movie released in the last 30 years, and fansites for every Hollywood actor and music flavor of the minute (the clock is ticking Beiber!).

With:

88.8 million .com domain names
13.2 million .net domain names
8.6 million .org domain names
79.2 million country code domains such as .cn or .uk.

And for those of you who still refuse to use or just do not care about Twitter: Twitter added 100 million new accounts last year and had a total of 175 million as of September 2010, Pingdom said, adding that 25 billion messages, or “tweets,” were sent in 2010.