I thought I felt something and, no, it wasn't the recent Oklahoma City area 4.0 earthquake. I kept noticing that I was hearing a lot more excitement about new things on the Internet in 2009 when we'd all been taking it for granted for some time. I knew a lot of lawyers in my audience would dismiss anything about social media as a timewaster for "kids." But I was also hearing stories of grandmothers who barely used the Internet until Facebook. So I mentioned social media quite a bit.
So check out these stats on 2009 Internet growth, fueled in part by the surge in interet in social media.
- 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; 18% increase in Internet users since previous year.
- 234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.
- 90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009; 1.4 billion email users worldwide.
- 26 million blogs on the Internet.
- 27.3 million tweets on Twitter per day as of Nov 2009.
- 350 million people on Facebook; 50% of them log in every day; + 500,000 active Facebook applications.
- 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009;
- 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
- 1 billion videos served by YouTube each day; 12.2 billion videos viewed per month;
- 924 million videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US as of Nov 2009; + the average Internet user in the US watches 182 online videos each month.
The stats above are from Adam Thierer's post on the Technology Liberation Front, which he distilled from Internet 2009 in Numbers. Hat tip to Dan Pinnington for the link.