State of the Internet

Some interesting stats about the current state of the Internet from Focus.com (with my comments in blue)...

Email

• Used by 1.9 billion people
• There are 2.9 billion known email accounts
• 25% of email accounts are business or corporate accounts
• 294 billion emails are sent daily
• In 2010, 107 trillion emails were sent (as a number, that's more than seven times the size of the U.S. national debt)
• Spam accounts for 89% of all email (I bet closer to 95% of my email is spam)

Websites

• There are 255 million websites
• 21.4 million websites were added in 2010, representing 8% of all websites
• There are 109 million domain names
• 7 million domain names were added in 2010, representing 6% of all domain names (what's really incredible is that there are any domain names left)

Internet Use

• The Internet is used by 2 billion people
• The number of people using the Internet increased 14% in 2010 (amazing that usage is continuing to grow at this rate)
• The leading web browsers are Internet Explorer (47%), Firefox (31%), Chrome (15%), Safari (5%), and Opera (2%) (for all of the hype Apple generates, one would think Safari would enjoy greater share)
• Internet use is greatest in 
• Asia (42%)
• Europe (24%)
• North America (14%) (Wow!  I would not have guessed North America would trail Asia and Europe by this amount)
• Latin America/Caribbean (10%)
• Africa (6%)
• Middle East (3%)
• Australia/Oceania (1%)
• Spam is greatest in 
• Europe (39%)
• Asia (34%)
• Latin America/Caribbean (13%)
• North America (10%) (I also would not have guessed North America would be underrepresented in spam - of course, the amount of offshore spam also suggests that there's not much we'll be able to do about it)
• Africa (3%)
• Australia/Oceania (1%)

Social Media

• There are now 600 million Facebook users (gulp)
• In 2010, 250 million Facebook users were added (big gulp)
• Every day, 20 million Facebook apps are installed
• 70% of Facebook users live outside of the U.S. (conversely, this means that 58% of the U.S. population is using Facebook)
• During 2010, 100 million Twitter accounts were created
• During 2010, 25 billion Tweets were sent
• There are 152 million blogs

Online Media

• Every day, 2 billion videos are watched on YouTube
• Every minute, 35 hours of video is being uploaded to YouTube
• Videos are watched by 84% of Internet users (how can 16% of Internet users spend any time online and avoid video?)
• Only 14% of Internet users have uploaded a video
• Every minute, 3 thousand images are uploaded to Flickr
• More than 5 billion images are hosted on Flickr
• More than 36 billion images were uploaded to Facebook in 2010 (this has gotta be a typo... right?)

So what does all of this mean for your business?  No matter what kind of business you operate, you better get wired or you will get wiped out.