When thinking about the Internet these days, many people think about ‘big data’, but we should also keep in mind the big numbers that the Internet is generating. This was driven home several weeks ago, when the Gangnam Style music video hit two billion views on YouTube, which The Economist pointed out represents 16,000 years of continual play!
Other milestones are somewhat less trivial:
- More than 1 billion Internet hosts
- More than 2 billion Wikipedia Project edits (including Wikipedia)
- Almost 3 billion Internet users
- Nearly 4 billion IPv4 addresses allocated
The list continues into the tens of billions (apps downloaded) and hundreds of billions (Tweets per year). In our recently release Global Internet Report, we compiled a number of these in the Timeline below. This graphic highlights some significant underlying trends as well, in terms of movements away from dial-up to fixed broadband, and then from fixed broadband to mobile broadband Internet access; from developed to developing world usage; and from text to video traffic.
What milestone did we miss?