How Big Is the Internet?

I haven’t looked for a while at worldwide Internet statistics. It’s always interesting to see how the Internet is growing and changing outside of the U.S. The last time I looked in August 2018, there were a little over 4.2 billion people connected to the Internet, a worldwide penetration rate of about 55%. Internet usage has continued to grow, and at the end of 2022, there were 5.54 billion Internet users, meaning that 69% of people in the world have access to the Internet. There are still roughly 2.7 billion people with no broadband access. New users on the Internet are growing at a rate of 8.2% annually.

The penetration of Internet usage still varies tremendously by continent. In North America, 93.4% of people use the Internet, followed by Europe at 89.2%. The lowest penetration is Africa at 43.2% and Asia at 67%. Asia has the most Internet users at over 2.9 billion compared to 747 million in Europe and 348 million in North America. China has over 1 billion Internet users.

The overall use of bandwidth continues to grow, and broadband usage for the world grew by 1,355% from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2022. The fastest-growing use of the Internet is in the Middle East, which saw usage grow by 6,141% since the beginning of 2020.

90% of people in the world use a mobile device to go online. Mobile devices account for 55% of all web traffic. Samsung is the largest mobile vendor with a 28.8 % market share. Second is Apple at 27.8%.

The most popular languages on the Internet are English (25.9%), Chinese (19.4%), and Spanish (8%).

32% of all Internet users are between the ages of 25 and 34.

The most popular web browser in the world is Chrome (65.5%), followed by Safari (18.8%), Microsoft Edge (4.3%), and Firefox (3.2%).

Google controls worldwide search with 92.7% of all searches, with Bing a distant second at 2.8%. Almost 30% of all global web traffic is initiated via an online search. There are currently 106,000 Google searches per second.

There are 1.5 billion websites, but less than 200 million are active. There are 371 million registered domain names in the world. More than 43% of all websites use WordPress as the content management system.

There are 4.9 billion users of social media. In January of this year, Facebook had 2.91 billion users. YouTube is second at 2.56 billion, followed by Whatsapp at 2 billion, Instagram at 1.47 billion, WeChat at 1.26 billion, and Tik Tok at 1 billion.

4.26 billion people used email in 2022. There were over 333 billion emails sent per day in 2022.

Many of these statistics are estimates, and there are varying estimates to be found for many of the statistics. As usual, when I look at these kinds of statistics, I get overwhelmed trying to put the numbers into context. Probably the biggest takeaway is that demand to use the Internet continues to soar, with over 8% more users worldwide every year. With 2.7 billion people still not using the web, we have a lot of growth to go.