How big is the Internet? This question is hard to answer, because the World Wide Web grows by the second. As we speak, more and more people are browsing the web, building new websites, sending emails, updating their social media status… The Internet never sleeps. The numbers for its performance in 2013 are more impressive than ever.
Active Web Users in 2013
The human population today is estimated at around 7.1 billion people. The number of web users in 2013 amounted to more than half of that number – 4.3 billion. Almost 40% of them lived in Asia.
The gap between desktop and mobile devices has started to quickly close. Desktop users were nearly 41% of the world’s active Internet users. The other 59% went to mobile device users.
The people who browsed the web on their smartphones, however, were more than those who preferred to rely on their tablets. Last year, smartphone web users reached a share of over 38%, while tablet users – 21.10%.
Total Number of Websites
The total number of websites in 2013 is estimated at nearly 760 million. However, only 510 million of them were active. Given these figures, it is more than impressive than only in 2013 the amount of new sites surpassed 100 million. In other words, about one-seventh of all websites that existed last year, were launched over the past twelve months. Approximately 43% of the most popular 1 million websites were hosted in the U.S.
As for the blogs, nearly half of them were powered by WordPress.
In addition, Internet sites continue to grow in size. In 2013, it increased by 23%. Nevertheless, the average page-load time has dropped by 13%.
Total number of Registered Domains
A domain name is the extension that comes after the name of the websites, like “.com” or “.org.” In 2013, there were more than 350 different domain name extensions. The most popular of them was “.com.” It has used in the domains of more than 132 million sites. Another 328 million domains were registered in 2013. In comparison, their total number is calculated at 1193 million. The most popular domain registrar was GoDaddy. It registered over 35% of the new domain names.
Internet Browser Statistics
Google Chrome continues to hold the largest share in this category. In 2013, it increased by about 5%, reaching 41%. Internet Explorer is still falling. Over the last one year, its shared dropped by 7% and by the end of 2013 it hit 23%. Mozilla Firefox saw the biggest rise. The browser’s popularity increased by 6%, totaling at little over 27%. Opera held 2.1% of the market, while the remaining 6.6% went to other web browsers.
Mobile Users Statistics
In 2013, mobile web users reached 1.9 billion. That pushed the global mobile data traffic to 1.9 exabytes… a month. In contrast, the monthly data traffic for a single smartphone users was almost 840 MB.
Language on the Web
Internet users who know English, Russian, German and Chinese are lucky since they have the chance to browse more web pages. That is due to the fact that the content of most sites in 2013 was namely in one of these four languages. English lead the way with 62%, followed by Russian (7%), German (5%) and Chinese (4%). The remaining 22% went to other languages like Swedish, Greek, Hindi, Arabic and etc.
Total Number of Google Searches
Unsurprisingly, Google was the most popular search engine in 2013. Its active users were estimated at more than 1.45 billion. They used Google to search different terms over 2.02 trillion times last year. That makes nearly 150 billion searches per month on the average. Only in the U.S, the search engine’s market share reached 63%. Right after it were Bing and Baidu.
E-mails
Number of email users surpassed 3.8 billion in 2013. That resulted in a daily email traffic of more than 182 billion of which 43% was spam and 13% non-essential.
Social Media & Multimedia
The most active country on social media websites in 2013 was Brazil. It witnessed 135,057 of Facebook posts per month. As for the total number of Facebook users for the world – it reached 1.6 billion. In comparison, active Twitter users were 234 million. Although Instagram and Google+ saw a growth in popularity, Facebook continues to dominate in many areas. For instance, Instagram photo uploads per day were 6.3 million, while on Facebook they amounted to 426 million.
Size of the Internet
So, let’s now try and answer the question – How big is the Internet?
Well, it is bigger than big! The total number of active webpages (not websites) is 14.3 trillion. The accessible data has now reached over 672 exabytes, while the global web traffic in 2013 was 43,639 petabytes. Ultimately, there is more than 1 yotta-byte of data stored on the World Wide Web. 1 yotta-byte is equal to 1 septillion bytes (a septillion is a number that contains 10 zeros). This is how big the Internet is!
