By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many Internet users are added each day, each week, or each minute?
We think we have a pretty good idea.
We relied on InternetWorldStats.com as our source for how many people worldwide are online as well as the world’s population. Its latest figures are from December 31, 2011, and show that 2,267,233,742 people are on the Internet worldwide, meaning an Internet penetration of 32.7%. The previous number published by Internet World Stats, from March 2011, said 2,095,006,005 people worldwide were on the Internet.
Let’s break the number of new Internet users down. In total, 172,227,737 people started using the Internet from March to December 2011. This breaks down as follows:
- 19,136,415 – Per month.
- 4,784,103 – Per week.
- 683,443 – Per day.
- 28,476 – Per hour.
- 474 – Per minute.
- 7.9 – Per second.
That’s almost 8 new people coming onto the Internet every second – that’s pretty amazing.
It’s clear where the potential is
To say that this is just the beginning though is an understatement. If you look at the Internet penetration numbers for the different parts of the world, you can clearly see where the growth is going to come from. North America is probably approaching saturation with 78.5% Internet penetration, and Europe and Oceania/Australia are not too far behind. The situation in Africa and Asia, however, is different, with only 13.5% and 26.2% Internet penetration respectively.
Imagine, when a bigger percentage of the huge populations of China and India come online, for example.
