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The latest numbers of active internet users worldwide reached 2.1 billion last year. Pingdom, an organization that monitors internet traffic, found that the number of internet users has jumped from a mere 360 million at the end of 2000 and now accounts for 30 percent of the planet’s population.

Sweeping across the continents, Asia holds 922 million internet users, Europe has 476 million, and North America is in third place with 271 million.

By the end of 2011, Facebook had more than 800 million users, 200 million of which joined the service just last year. The number of Twitter accounts rose to 225 million, with 100 million active users in 2011. Lady Gaga ended 2011 as the most popular person on Twitter, currently followed by 18.1 million people, while #Egypt was the top hashtag on the site last year. Overall, 2.4 billion social network accounts flooded cyberspace in 2011.

Check out some of the statistics below and head on over to Pingdom for the full list.

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Websites
  • 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
  • 300 million – Added websites in 2011.
Web servers
  • 239.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2011.
  • 68.7% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2011.
  • 34.4% – Growth in the number of NGINX websites in 2011.
  • 80.9% – Growth in the number of Google websites in 2011.
Social media
  • 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
  • 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011.
  • 350 million – Number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone.
  • 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
  • 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
  • 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user.
  • 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011).
  • 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter.
  • 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards.
  • $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011.
  • 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
  • 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
  • 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011).
  • 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts.
  • 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.
Videos
  • 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
  • 140 – The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth.
  • 48 hours – The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
  • 1 – The most viewed video on YouTube during 2011 was Rebecka Black’s “Friday.”
  • 82.5% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet audience that viewed video online.
  • 76.4% – YouTube’s share of the U.S. video website market (December 2011).
  • 4,189,214 – Number of new users on Vimeo.
  • 201.4 billion – Number of videos viewed online per month (October 2011).
  • 88.3 billion – Videos viewed per month on Google sites, incl. YouTube (October 2011).
  • 43% – Share of all worldwide video views delivered by Google sites, incl. YouTube.
Images
  • 14 million – Number of Instagram accounts created during 2011.
  • 60 – The average number of photos uploaded per second to Instagram.
  • 100 billion – Estimated number of photos on Facebook by mid-2011.
  • 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.
  • 4.5 million – Number of photos uploaded to Flickr each day.
  • 6 billion – Photos hosted on Flickr (August 2011).
  • 1 – Apple iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on Flickr.