The Internet of 2009 in numbers | Hacker News Reader

The Internet of 2009 in numbers

royal.pingdom.com

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"179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean."

Statistics like these, with overstated and confusing precision, bug me. Why not say 180 Million?

1,73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).

This is about how many people there were in the world 100 years ago.

Staggering numbers:

Social media 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse). 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men. 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009) 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States. 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user). 350 million – People on Facebook. 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day. 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

other staggering numbers:

148,000 - New zombie computers created per day

81% - The percentage of emails that were spam

I bet the 10.3% of internet users in Latin America represent a bigger business opportunity than the 14.6% in North America, due to the difference in market saturation.

What about difference in disposable income?

Notice that there are 3 times as many internet users in Asia as in North America. Food for thought.

Exactly... a business plan focused on internationalization is more important now than ever.

Sure, but from a business perspective, those users in Asia may also be harder to monetize, depending on your market and business model. Even Google apparently had issues monetizing China, for instance, cyber-warfare and censorship aside. But you're right, web startups should definitely be looking more to Asia these days.

It's hard but it isn't impossible: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/shenzhen/3

I would suggest also contrasting Asia and North America's total populations. I suspect you'll find they vary by a larger constant than 3.

My point was more in relation to potential customers, which from an entrepreneurial view is the interesting metric.

Did anyone else notice there are more Internet users than there are people on this planet?

Approximately 6.8 billion people on the earth[1], versus the 1.7 billion internet users.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

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