The Internet is one dynamic environment which cannot be fully captured and viewed in just a few sentences. However, we will take the challenge and try to do it. In this article, we will take a look at some interesting statistics concerning, for example, the most popular Internet browsers, the number of sent emails and online users and etc.
For that purpose, we did some digging around and now we will present to you the most amusing facts revealed by Pingdom related to the Internet world in 2012. The data concerns both shorter and longer periods of the year.
The total number of emails that were sent in 2012 ad to 2.2 billion. In addition, the global daily email traffic was 144 billion. In 2012, there were 4.3 email clients. The most popular of them was Mail for iOS devices which reached 35.6% of the users. Also, the leading email provider was Gmail which had 425 million active clients. An interesting fact is that more than half of all sent emails (61%) were non-essential. Moreover, nearly 70% of the sent emails in 2012 were found to be spam and half of them were about pharmaceuticals. The good news is that last year, only 0.22% of the emails were phishing attacks.
Websites, Web pages, Web Hosting
In December, it was estimated that there were about 634 million websites. Nearly 1/12 of them were created in 2012. Most of the websites (43%) were hosted in the U.S., while WordPress was the most popular blog platform (48%). Tumblr made a progress with nearly 88 million blogs and 17.8 million page views. In comparison, WordPress webpages had an average of 3.5 million views. The page views on Reddit amounted to the impressive 37 billion. It was also discovered that the average webpage grew by about 35% in 2012 and it became 4% slower.
Web Servers
Last year, the number of Apache websites decreased with -6.7%. However, there was a rise in the number of websites that used server software applications from IIS (32.4%), NGINX (36.4%) and Google (15.9%).
Domain Names
In 2012, there were 246 million domain names that were registered. The top level domains amounted to 329 and that of the .com domain reached 100 million. Other domains were nowhere near this figure. The .net domains were a little over 14 million, while the .org ones were 9.7 million. Even lower was the number of .info (6.7 million) and .biz (2.2 million). GoDaddy.com was the most popular domain name registrar in 2012 with a market share of over 32%. The priciest domain name was Investing.com which was bought for $2.45 million.
Internet Users
The total number of people who used the Internet in 2012 was 2.4 billion. Most of them (1.1 billion) were from Asia and Europe (519 million). North and South American each scored over 250 web users, while the Middle East and Oceania had less than 100 million users. The country with the highest number of Internet users was China. The Asian country had more users than those of North America, South America and Oceania put together (556 million). This is quite impressive since China is not even among the top countries with highest Internet penetration rate. The Web penetration in China is currently around 42%. In comparison, in the UK it is over 84% which is twice as big.
Facebook users in Brazil were the most active ones. It was estimated that they publish near 86,000 posts every month. In addition, this October, the amount of active FB users passed 1billion. Also, the men on Facebook were more than the women who were only 47%. The average age of the users on the social network was 40.5 years. In 2012, the “Like” button was clicked 2.7 billion times… every day! In addition, around 24% of the 10,000 most popular websites had FB integration.
Twitter numbers are more modest. There the number of active users was 200 million per month. The most retweeted post on the microblogging site was the one in which Barack Obama announces his reelection. It was reposted by more than 819,000 users. The same event triggered 327,452 tweets per minute. In contrast, the tweets per minute during the 2012 London Olympics’ opening were 9.66 million. Every day, there are 175 million tweets posed on the network. The average age of Twitter users in 2012 was 37.3 years. Also, every user posted 307 tweets and had 51 followers on the average. In July, the total number of tweets since the opening of the website passed 163 billion. Another curious Twitter fact is that over 120 state heads have an account on the platform.
Right after that are LinkedIn and Google+. LinkedIn passed 187 million users in Sepetmber, while Google+ had 135 million users by the end of 2012. The most popular social media marketing tools last year was HootSuite with a market share of 20.8%.
Web Browsers
The most popular web browser over the last 12 months was Chrome with a share of 36.4%. It was followed by IE (30.8%) and Firefox (21.9). Safari held about 7.9% and Opera – 1.3%. The remaining 1.7% were taken by other browsers.
Search
In 2012, there were 1.2 trillion searches conducted on Google which makes the search engine a leader on the U.S. market with an impressive share of 67%. The most popular question on Ask.com was about the breakup of Robert Pattison and Kristen Steward.
Mobile
Last year, the number of mobile phones users was 5 billion, 1.3 million of which used smartphones. 66% of the smart mobile phones had an Android operating system. The mobile share of the total Internet traffic on the world was 13% and the monthly mobile data traffic was 1.3 exabytes. That means that the average smartphone user consumed about 500 MB of data traffic. In addition, the average connection speed for smartphones was 1.820 kbps which is 3.5 times more than the average connection speed on handsets.
Video
The most watched video in 2012 was “Gangnam Style” which was the first video to pass 1billion views. Also, video sharing site Vimeo reach 14 million users last year. Every month, Internet users watch about 4 billion hours of video on YouTube. In addition, video streaming site Ustream reached 60 million global views per month.
What Does 2013 Has In Store?
2013 is only just beginning. Therefore, we can only make predictions for now. Some of them are that more and more people will access the Internet via their mobile device and social websites will become even more important to most of us. Also, it is expected that this year the Internet will be used for both professional and private needs.
