STATS: The Numbers Just Keep On Getting Bigger: Social Media And The Internet 2011

By Shea Bennett at Media Bistro:
Did you know that there are now more than a billion social media profiles, representing around half of all internet users worldwide? Or that 44 percent of all online users are in Asia, and that China accounts for 485 million people, even with a countywide internet penetration of just 36.3 percent?
What if I told you that 45 percent of internet users are under the age of 25, that there are more than 3 billion email accounts and the total number of registered .com domain names is closing in rapidly on 100 million?
However you look at it, 2011 was a massive year for social media – and an even bigger one for the internet. A new study by Pingdom has unveiled a “veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data”, taking a closer look at the what happened in social media, email, websites, web servers, domain names, users, browsers, mobile, video and images in 2011.
Social Media

• 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011
• 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011
• 350 million – Number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone
• 100 billion – Estimated number of photos on Facebook by mid-2011
• 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts
• 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011
• 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user
• 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011)
• 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter
• 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards
• $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011
• 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011
• 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011
• 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011)
• 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts
• 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide

The Internet

• 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide – Microsoft Outlook is the number one email client (27.6 percent share), and the average corporate user sends and receives 112 emails every day
• 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011) – 300 million new websites were added in 2011
• 95.5 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2011 (no wonder you can’t find a good one)
• 2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide – 44 percent of these are in Asia
• 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube
• 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971

All of this begs the question: what has the internet got in store for us in 2012? With Asia and many other parts of the world still largely untapped, one thing’s for sure: this mind-blowing growth isn’t over yet.