If you pull everything in a computer far back enough, what you’ll wind up with is nothing more than a sequence of numbers — zeros and ones, specifically, that create everything we see online and offline. These numbers are certainly vital to the world of the web, but there are also plenty of other figures that arise which bear some recognition. Here are a few of the most important web and search engine figures of 2010.
- There are now an estimated 255 million websites on the web. 21.4 million of these were added in 2010 alone.
- Domain name purchases increased by 7%. There are now 202 million top-level domains, of which 88.8 million are .com.
- Web servers saw growth across the board, including Google’s GWS sites, which saw 5.8% growth in 2010. More significantly, Apache servers increased by 39.1% while Lighttpd grew by 55.7%.
- Total internet use increased by 14%, to 1.97 billion internet users around the world. The leaders are Asia (825.1 million) and Europe (475.1 million), with North America coming in third (266.2 million).
- Social media saw an especially significant boom in all sectors. There are currently 152 million blogs around the world,100 million new Twitter accounts from 2010 alone, 600 million people on Facebook (including 250 million new users), and a greater portion of these are coming from outside the U.S. (70% of Facebook users are now non-U.S. accounts).
- Web communication has gone hyper, with 25 billion tweets being sent, alongside 107 trillion emails. Of course, 89.1% of those emails (99.3 trillion) were spam messages.
- Users watched 730 billion YouTube videos last year, with plenty of selections to choose from, as YouTube saw 18 million hours of new videos uploaded.
All facts and figures come from Royal Pingdom and associated groups (a full list of partners is available at the provided link).
