Google has estimated some amazing facts about the internet. Since the dawn of Internet time, the number of websites has grown exponentially and so too has the amount of information available and created.
The Internet has shaped our lives in profound ways, especially if you’re old enough to remember the pre-Internet era where a business card was the equivalent of a LinkedIn profile.
Facts About The Internet
NOTE: sourced from multiple locations, tried to be as statistically accurate as possible as of May 2013.
1.
Google estimated in 2010, that the data size of the Internet is 5 million Terabytes, 61% from videos, and growing rapidly. Google has the largest index of the Internet out of any company, but claims to have scanned only 0.004% of the total.
2.
There’s an estimated 637 million websites (source), of which there are over 250 million blogs.
3.
"There are approximately 4,200 new domain names registered every hour, or around 37 million per year."
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4.
WordPress, the most widely known Content Management System (CMS) for websites, powers approximately 63 million blogs, but is not the largest blog provider.
Tumblr.com has 102 Million blogs, Livejournal reports 63 million blogs and Weebly states it has over 12 million blogs.
5.
Facebook has an estimated 1.2 Billion active users.
To put that into perspective, there’s about 7 billion people on Earth. 17% of humans are on Facebook.
6.
Even more crazy is that there are about 2.4 billion Internet users. That means 50% of all Internet users are on Facebook.
7.
On the original “The Facebook” website, Al Pacino’s face can be seen in the upper left-hand corner.
8.
The first ever email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomilinson, the US programmer who invented the email system.
The “@” symbol was used to signify that the message was sent to a person instead of a machine.
9.
About 250 billion emails are sent every day.
10.
"81% of all emails sent is considered to be spam. That’s 200 billion every day."
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11.
The first spam message sent to multiple recipients was sent in 1978 for DEC System 2020. The 600 recipients were not pleased to receive it.
12.
The first ever website is still online here.
13.
Twitter was first described by founder Jack Dorsey, as an SMS-based social network, codenamed twttr. He sent the first tweet on March 21, 2006, “just setting up my twttr”.
There are now about 1,700 tweets sent every second.
14.
Garfield the cartoon cat once offered a free email service.
Can you guess the domain name?
It was gmail.com, later acquired by Google.
15.
An estimated 65% of Americans watch TV and use the Internet simultaneously. 80% of all Americans are online.
16.
"Over a billion people watch videos on YouTube every month, averaging 4 hours each per month."
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17.
72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and YouTube’s copyright-checking software scans over 100 years of video every day.(source)
18.
The first ever webcam was deployed at Cambridge University computer lab. No, it wasn’t to Skype or Facetime. It was used to watch a pot of coffee.
19.
"The iPhone 4 is about 2,000 times faster than the Super Nintendo."
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20.
Both Apple’s iTunes store and Google’s Play store claim to have over 800,000 apps each.
780,000 iOS apps are downloaded every hour.
21.
It’s estimated that 80% of all images on the Internet are of naked women. I spent a few hours trying to verify this statistic. I think the remaining 20% are of cats.
