How many internet users are there worldwide

Internet users are currently growing at an annual rate of 4. However, the coronavirus pandemic has had a big impact on internet user research, so actual growth figures may be much higher that this rate suggests. Most internet users Social media use continues to grow too, with global users reaching 4. The number of social media users has increased by 9. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of the world has a mobile phone, with smartphones accounting for almost 4 in 5 of all the mobile handsets in use today.

Looking for more stats? Our Digital October Global Statshot Report has all the latest need-to-know digital stats from around the world. Alternatively, scroll down this page to find a summary of all the key headlines. There are 4. Here we answer these and other key questions to understand social media use around the world.

We begin with an outline of key trends and conclude with a perspective on the rate of adoption of social media relative to other modern communication technologies. The first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was MySpace — it achieved this milestone around This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it. In the interactive chart we plot monthly active users, by platform, since This chart shows that there are some large social media sites that have been around for ten or more years, such as Facebook, YouTube and Reddit; but other large sites are much newer.

TikTok, for example, launched in September and by mid it had already reached half a billion users. To put this in perspective: TikTok gained on average about 20 million new users per month over this period. The data also shows rapid changes in the opposite direction. Once-dominant platforms have disappeared. In , Hi5, MySpace and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook, yet by they had virtually no share of the market. The case of MySpace is remarkable considering that in it temporarily surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US.

Most of the social media platforms that survived the last decade have shifted significantly in what they offer users. With 2. YouTube, Instagram and WeChat follow, with more than a billion users. Tumblr and TikTok come next, with over half a billion users. The bar chart here shows a ranking of the top social media platforms, year by year. You can drag the slider in this chart to see the ranking for other years. The aggregate numbers mask a great deal of heterogeneity across platforms — some social media sites are much more popular than others among specific population groups.

In general, young people are more likely to use social media than older people. But some platforms are much more popular among younger people. This is shown in this chart, where we plot the breakdown of social media use by age groups in the US.

If they do, the age gradient would narrow. This chart shows the percentage of men and women who use different platforms in the US. The diagonal line marks parity; so sites above the diagonal line are those more popular among men and sites below are those more popular among women. Bubble sizes are proportional to the total number of users of each platform. For some platforms the gender differences are very large.

The world is very well still in the early stages of the Internet. Between and , the number of Internet users increased from million to over 3. The number of users in some countries, like Bangladesh and Ghana , has doubled in the last three years alone.

For China, which has the highest number of Internet users, and India, the country with the second-highest number of users, the largest increase in Internet users in recent years has been smartphone users.

These are the two regions in the world with the highest internet penetration rates. There are currently That's over million websites. In , billion emails are being sent per day. By , this number is expected to increase to Every minute, Americans generate 3,, GB of internet traffic. The most common domain name extensions are:. This dip compared to the year before could be due to the increased dependence on desktop devices during the Coronavirus pandemic or part of a larger trend.

Most indications are that mobile will settle somewhere near 50 percent of all traffic. In , just 0. The top 10 most visited sites on the web in were: 1. Google 2. YouTube 3. Tmall 4. Baidu 5. Sohu 7. Facebook 8. Taobao 9. Amazon Blogger is the largest blogging platform with over 46 million monthly active users. The majority of bloggers are women. Currently, there are more than 2 billion websites online. The average speed of websites in every industry in the United States is seconds.