The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000 - Pingdom Royal
The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000
October 22, 2010 in Tech blog
It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.
Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.
We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.
Worldwide Internet users, 2000 and 2010
First off, the one thing you probably wanted to know right away. Here is how much the Internet has grown since the year 2000.
There were only 361 million Internet users in 2000, in the entire world. For perspective, that’s barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today.
The chart really says it all. There are more than five times as many Internet users now as there were in 2000. And as has been noted elsewhere , the number of Internet users in the world is now close to passing two billion and may do so before the end of this year.
The Internet hasn’t just become larger, it’s also become more spread out, more global.
In 2000, the top 10 countries accounted for 73% of all Internet users.
In 2010, that number has decreased to 60%.
This becomes evident when viewing the distribution of Internet users for the top 50 countries in 2000 and in 2010. Note how much “thicker” the tail of the 2010 graph is.
Thanks to this growth, there are now many more countries with a significant presence on the Internet. Here’s another way to see how much things have changed:
Countries with