Web in 2011: 2.1 billion users and 555 million websites

In 2011 there were 2.1 billion internet users around the globe surfing an estimated 555 million websites - 300 million of which were created in 2011.

Asia’s massive internet population grew from 825.1 million internet users in June 2010 to 922.2 million in March 2011. Internet populations in Europe (476.2 million users), North America (271.1 million users), Latin America/Caribbean (215.9 million internet users), Africa (118.6 million internet users) and the Middle East (68.6 million users) saw comparatively modest growth.

Each internet user had on average just under 1.5 email accounts, amounting to a total of 3.146 billion accounts worldwide.

Out of all the email clients around, Microsoft Outlook was the most popular. Web-based mail client Hotmail picked up the award for the largest email service in the world with a total of 360 million users.

The average corporate user sent and received 112 emails a day. Despite having strong spam filters set in their email client, 19 percent of the emails delivered to their inbox were classified as unwanted spam.

Overall the rate of email spam appears to be decreasing. In 2011, 71 percent of the worldwide email traffic was spam, down from 89.1 percent in 2010. Only 0.39 percent of all email received in 2011 was malicious.

Few additional facts about the internet in 2011:
1) China had the highest number of internet users in 2011: 485 million.
2) 45% of the web’s population was under the age of 25 in 2011.
3) The most expensive domain name sold in 2011 was social.com. It sold for $2.6 million. The domain name DomainName.com tied with Dudu.com in second place, selling for a cool $1 million.
4) 200 million people signed up to Facebook, putting the total number of users at over 800 million.
5) There were more IM (instant messenger) accounts than social networking accounts (2.6 billion vs 2.4 billion).
6) The Apple iPhone 4 was the most popular camera on photo sharing website Flickr.

Web monitoring company Pingdom scoured the web and crunched its own numbers to come up with this unique snapshot of the web in 2011. The entire list of internet milestones can be found on the company’s Royal Pingdom blog.

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