Since we are now in year 2010, lets take a quick look at what happened on the internet in 2009.

On the list below we can see that the worldwide internet users has increased by 18% in 2009… That’s equivalent to an overwhelming 1.73 billion users of the total 6.8 billion people living on the planet in 2009!

To give you a more detailed statistics, lets take a peek at these figures:

Total Internet Users In 2009 - 1.73 billion

1. 738,257,230 - Internet users in Asia.
2. 418,029,796 - Internet users in Europe.
3. 252,908,000 - Internet users in North America.
4. 179,031,479 - Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
5. 67,371,700 - Internet users in Africa.
6. 57,425,046 - Internet users in the Middle East.
7. 20,970,490 - Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

On the above statistic, we can see that Asia contributed more users. Almost 50% of the total worldwide users combined.

Social Media

• 126 million - Number of blogs on the Internet.
• 350 million - People on Facebook.
• 50% - % of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 - The number of active Facebook applications.

• 27.3 million - Tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009).
• 57% - % of Twitter users in the United States.
• 4.25 million - People following Ashton Kutcher.

As I was checking on these figures, I was amazed that 84% of the total social networking site users are WOMEN.

Images

• 4 billion - Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion - Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion - Number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion - The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion - Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million - Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 - The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% - Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% - YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% - Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Websites

• 234 million - The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million - Added websites in 2009.

Email

• 90 trillion - The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion - Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion - The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million - New email users since the year before.

• 81% - The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% - Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% - Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion - The number of spam emails per day.

Domain names

• 81.8 million - .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million - .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million - .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 8% - Increase in domain names since the year before.

Web browsers

• 62.7% - Internet Explorer
• 24.6% - Firefox
• 4.6% - Chrome
• 4.5% - Safari
• 2.4% - Opera
• 1.2% - Other

Malicious software

* 148,000 - New zombie computers created per day.
* 2.6 million - Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
* 921,143 - The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

This is the reason why it is important to regularly update your antivirus software because more are expected to come in 2010 so always get protected.

SOURCES: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom, Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.