By Ronit Dolev

Now that 2009 is three months behind us – the numbers are starting to roll in – how much did the internet grow, how many people used it – and for what? Below I’ve compiled some of the more interesting figures from the year – enjoy! (Unless otherwise stated, data is courtesy Pingdom)

JGooders was not the only new website added to the growing cyberspace over the course of last year; 47 million new sites were launched in 2009. Luckily, while number of sites continued to grow, there was also an increase in the number of users by 18% over the previous year. In September 2009, it is estimated that there were 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide. One might assume that most of them come from North America – but see the numbers below:

* 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia
* 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe
* 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America
* 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean
* 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa
* 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East
* 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia

When I saw the following numbers below, I couldn’t help thinking about how we spend our time, and what we have to give up doing to do be online as much as we are:

* 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009
* 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day
* 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide
* 100 million – New email users since the year before

Makes you wonder…but even these numbers don’t reflect our time online – it’s just e-mails. You need to read and answer them but then think about all the other online activities out there – tweeting, sharing links with the growing number of your online friends, groups, blogs, networks, etc.. So here is what it accumulates to globally:

350 million – People on Facebook
50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day
126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse)
84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men
27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States

And we did not mention, googling, gaming, shopping, chatting, traveling, Skypeing…if this is how much time we spent online in 2009 – just imagine what the future holds – each of us will literally spend years of our lives in front of computers. We had better do good with some of this years.

Tags: blogs, facebook, internet, statistics, twitter

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