It’s no surprise that we love the Internet. Since its debut 30 years ago, the world is a much different place because of its influence. The way we interact with one another, exchange ideas and information, buy and sell things, consume content and media… even our phones have become mini Internet devices to keep us plugged into the World Wide Web.

In this ever-changing digital ecosystem, we wanted to share some interesting facts about the Internet that show off just how amazing it is.

1. As of late 2018, there are almost 2 billion websites with over 5 million blog posts published each day.
2. On the topic of sheer volume, 250 billion emails are sent out daily. Unsurprisingly, just over 80% of them are spam.
3. A single 50 kB email message takes up roughly 8 billion electrons; while that number sounds big, it’d still weigh less than one quadrillionth of an ounce.
4. If all of the electrons that make up the Internet were condensed into one physical form, all of the Internet’s energy could be stored within two ounces — the same weight as a single strawberry.
5. The world’s first website (info.cern.ch) is still online, written in HTML with only a couple lines of text and some hyperlinks explaining what the World Wide Web is.
6. 51% of all Internet traffic is fake — meaning 49% are real humans while the others are bots and spamming software.
7. Seven people control the entire Internet. In other words, in case something happens and the Internet just stops or goes down, seven people from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) who each hold seven different keys can restore it. There are also seven copies of the original key in case one of them is faulty or gets lost.
8. The Internet needs the electrical equivalent of 50 million horsepower to run. In that same vein, there are roughly 8.7 billion electronic devices connected to the Internet, meaning there are more Internet devices than there are people alive.
9. There are an estimated 4.5 billion people who use the Internet which accounts for about 59% of the world’s population.
10. While Asia has the highest number of people connected to the Internet (2.2 billion), North America has the highest concentration of Internet users at 89.4%.
11. The most popular browser between Aug 2018 and Aug 2019 is Google Chrome ranging between 59.7% last year and growing to 64.0% this year; the second most popular is Safari from 14.5% to 15.5% in the same time period.
12. The most popular social media site between Aug 2018 and Aug 2019 is Facebook from 65.2% to 71.8%; the second most popular is Pinterest from 13.5% to 15.5%. Comparatively, with these two platforms as well as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, reddit, and Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest are the only platforms that have seen growth in membership over the past year (though Facebook is recovering from a sharp decline in 2017).Sources: https://lifehacks.io/facts-about-the-internet/ | https://www.lifewire.com/surprising-facts-about-the-web-3862898 | https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm | https://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/worldwide/2019