How big is the Internet ?

The internet refers to World Wide Web, the unique world network of interconnected computers through Transmission Control Protocol communication protocols ( TCP / IP ).

In the last few years, people have often wondered how big is this “internet”. We all imagine that the Internet is big, however did you knew that it’s size it’s impossible to measure? Having so much information available only through a single click, it is easy to understand why it seams that the entire volume of data found on the Internet is just overwhelming.

Here is a perspective on the Internet

- Google estimates that the Internet contains almost 5 million terabytes of Data.

Google, as the biggest and most popular data collector on the Internet managed to index so far only 200 terabytes of data.

Comparable, the human brain can only hold a volume from 1 to a maximum of 10 terabytes. Allotting, for example, 5 terabytes to each human, we need around 1 million human brains to store all the information we can find on the Internet.

Other examples: 212 DVD’s to store 1 terbytes, which means that we need more than 1 million DVD’s to store the entire internet.

2. The population of the Internet or how many Internet users we can find in different regions of the World:

North America: 76.2%
Australia and Oceania: 60.8%
Europe: 50.3%
Latin America 31.9%
Middle East: 28.8%
Asia: 20.1%
Africa: 8.7%
Average: only  26.6% of the entire World population are internet users.

3. Every day, almost 247 billion emails are sent. Out of them, 81% are spam messages ( this means 200 billion spam emails each day. )

4. For the moment, we couldn’t exactly establish if the Internet has managed to beat the TV in some regions of the world.

This is very hard to estimate because a big chunk of Internet users are also using the TV in the same time. For example, 59% of Americans are using the Internet and watch TV programs in the same time.

5. On average, a teenage internet user spends 31 hours online each week.

These hours are spread base don the needs and wishes of each one, but on average a teenager spends 3.5 chatting and 2 hours on entertainment web sites.

6. 234 million web sites and more than 126 million blogs.

7. Each second, 28.258 users access and follow pornographic content on the Internet.

8. The mobile internet has grown a lot in the last years, so more and more people are accessing online content directly from their mobile phones.

So, 87% of users access the mobile Internet more than once a day. Also, 81% of them spend 15 minutes online each time.

9. For what purpose do we actually use the Internet for? Well it seams that 16% of users use the Internet for fun, 10% to search for information, 13% for financial and banking information, 34% for services and 5% to shop and play online.

10. From a social network point of view,Twitter has 105 million registered users, while Facebook is bragging with more than 400 million active users.

Also, 6 million pages are viewed each minute on Facebook and 2.5 billion photos are uploaded each month.

11. YouTube is also a very popular web site. Each month 12.2 billion videos are viewed and 51% of YouTube users visit the web site at least once every week.

Further more, each minute 20 hours of video content are uploaded on YouTube. In Hollywood, 86.000 movies should be made to compensate the volume of videos posted on YouTube each minute.

Related News / Articles:

1. The secret of a 100 times faster Internet
2. The Sex.com domain name is now for sale
3. Forgiveness Engine, the place where you can ask for forgiveness online
4. False security update distributed by email
5. Windows Embedded Compact 7
6. AMD releases the new Opteron 4000 series platform