How Big is the Internet?
This is the age old question. When developing Internet marketing strategies, you need good demographic and statistics to base your plan on. The Internet exists on millions of computers around the world and there is no person or company that controls it. You can look at the number of domain names issued, but not all domain names issued are being used.
How big is the Internet? Luckily, a company called Netcraft is continually indexing websites on the Internet. As of April 2007, they had indexed 113,658,468 individual websites. This number is up 2.8% in one month (33.8% Annually). Netcraft is only reporting the websites that it has actually found.
How many people use the Internet? According to Internet World Stats there are 211,108,086 Internet users in the United States which is about 70% of the US population. World wide there are 1.1 billion Internet users or about 17% of the world population. This is based on information updated as of March 10, 2007.
How many searches do American’s make? According to Comscore Americans conducted 7.3 billion searches online in March 2007, up 14 percent versus March 2006. Google Sites captured 48.3 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.2 share points from the previous month. Google Sites led the pack with 3.5 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (798 million), Ask Network (379 million), and Time Warner Network (368 million).
How many people use broadband? According to ClickZ Network The U.S. maintains the largest total number of broadband subscribers among countries tracked by OECD, with 29 percent of all broadband connections. U.S. broadband subscribers reached 58.1 million in December 2006. Worldwide there are a total of 197 million broadband subscribers worldwide.
Other interesting trends include the average display resolution is now at 1024×768 (54%) and although Internet Explorer is the dominant browser (58.7%), Firefox is continuing to increase market share (31.8%).
These statistics help shape website design and Internet marketing strategies for businesses.