The Internet is growing and a new report released by the Royal Pingdom reveals exactly how--and by how much.
More people are surfing the Web than ever before: the number of users increased 14 percent between 2009 and 2010, from 1.73 billion to 1.97 billion users worldwide.
Much of this growth came from Asia, which saw its Web-browsing population grow from 738 million to 825 million over the past year. But it was Africa that had the most drastic uptick, registering a 64 percent increase from 67 million to 110 million users. By comparison, North America has some 266 million active Internet users.
Though more people are logging on, the pace at which the Web itself is expanding seems to have slowed. Though 21.4 million websites were added in 2010, bringing the total number of sites up to 255 million, over double that many sites--47 million--were added in 2009.
If you're getting more emails asking you to donate money to a Nigerian prince, you're not alone: 89.1 percent of all emails received are spam, up to 262 billion from 200 billion last year.
And who says email is dead? The number of total emails sent over the year has swelled as well from 90 trillion to 107 trillion. Perhaps it's because 480 million new email users came online in 2010, a big increase from the 100 million people added in 2009.
The browsers we're using to access online content are shifting, as well. Reflecting other recent figures, Internet Explorer's hold over web server domination is waning. IE's market share dropped 62.7 percent to 46.9 percent, while Google Chrome's share more than tripled from 4.6 percent to 14.9 percent.
An overwhelming 84 percent of people are watching videos online. The number of videos watched on YouTube alone doubled from 2009 to 2010 from 1 billion to 2 billion.
As the Internet grows, so too grows social media goliath Facebook.
Despite intensifying scrutiny over privacy issues, and complaints over changes to the interface, Facebook added 250 million people from 2009 to 2010. Facebook also saw its global presence improve: 70 percent of Facebook users are from outside of the U.S., compared to last year's 43 percent. Facebook's population of 600 million users are an active bunch, creating 30 billion pieces of content each month.