Wednesday, 3 September was a very important day in the history of the Internet – it celebrated its 40th birthday! A computer scientist, Len Kleinrock, and his team at UCLA began experiments 40 years ago, laying the foundation of what we call today, “The Internet”. So, we decided that this week’s Friday Fact Box should be dedicated to facts surrounding the evolution of the Internet and worldwide user statistics.
We'll first take a look at the figures from way back when:
From All About Market Research - Internet Growth Statistics (January 2008)
The following graph plots the incredible increase in world-wide Internet users since 1995.
- In December 1996 there were 16 million Internet users worldwide – only 0.4 % of the population.
- This figure has grown to 1.6 billion internet users and a 24.7 % penetration.
From Internet World Stats - World Internet Users and Population Stats (June 2009)
| Region | Internet Penetration | Number of Users | Percentage growth from 2000 to 2009 |
| Africa | 6.7% | 65,903,900 | 1,359.9% |
| Asia | 18.5% | 704,213,930 | 516.1% |
| Europe | 50.1% | 402,380,474 | 282.9% |
| Middle East | 23.7% | 47,964,146 | 1,360.2% |
| North America | 73.9% | 251,735,500 | 132.9% |
| Latin America/Caribbean | 30.0% | 175,834,439 | 873.1% |
| Oceania/Australia | 60.1% | 20,838,439 | 173.4% |
| WORLD TOTAL | 24.7% | 1,668,870,408 | 362.3% |
This information can also be seen graphically as follows:
From Internet World Stats - Top 20 Countries with Highest Number of Internet Users (March 2009)
| Country | % of world users | Penetration | User growth from 2000 to 2008 |
| China | 18.7% | 22.4% | 1,244.4% |
| US | 14.2% | 74.7% | 138.3% |
| Japan | 5.9% | 73.8% | 99.7% |
| India | 5.1% | 7.1% | 1,520.0% |
| Brazil | 4.2% | 34.4% | 1,250.2% |
From New Media Trend Watch – Graphs and Statistics (August 2009) (click to enlarge image)
- China overtook the USA in number of Internet users in 2007
But what will these figures look like in years to come?
From eMarketer - Online Branding with a French Flair (May 2009)
eMarketer predicts how many users there will be in 2013 for each of the top 10 countries.
Top 10 countries ranked by Internet users in 2009 compared to 2013:
- China: 313.0 million in 2009 is predicted to increase to 476.0 million in 2013
- US: 199.2 million is predicted to increase to 221.1 million
- Japan: 92.3 million is predicted to increase to 95.7 million
- India: 49.7 million is predicted to increase to 96.8 million
- Germany: 48.0 million is predicted to increase to 53.1 million
- Russia: 45.8 million is predicted to increase to 61.9 million
- Brazil: 44.2 million is predicted to increase to 64.6 million
- UK: 39.4 million is predicted to increase to 43.7 million
- South Korea: 36.1 million is to predicted increase to 38.1 million
- France: 37.0 million is predicted to increase to 40.8 million
- According to recent estimates, there were 6.6 billion people in the world in 2007. Of that number, 1.15 billion (or 17.5%) were regular Internet users. By 2012, eMarketer projects that over 1.7 billion people worldwide (24.5%) will access the Internet at least once per month.
- By 2012, nearly 50% of the world's Internet population will live in the Asia-Pacific region. The share of the world's Internet users in Europe and North America will fall, though absolute numbers will continue to rise in both regions, as the share of users in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region both grow.
