The Internet In 2012: 634 Million Websites, 2.4 Billion Users

The folks from uptime monitoring company Royal Pingdom have assembled a gargantuan list of various internet-related stats from 2012, and it's a very interesting read.

Though we've seen nearly all of these numbers before — for example, we covered Facebook passing 1 billion users in October as well as Twitter's 200 million in December — seeing them all in one place reminds you of how small and insignificant we are in the vast ocean of data that is the internet.

Highlights from the list include 2.2 billion email users worldwide (425 million use Gmail, making it the biggest email service around), 634 million websites (with 51 million being added to the web every year) and 246 million domain name registrations in 2012.

There were 100 million .com domain names (remember the first one, registered in 1985?), 2.4 billion internet users worldwide, and 1.2 trillion searches on Google in 2012.

On the social media front, in 2012 there were 2.7 billion likes on Facebook every day, 175 million tweets were sent on Twitter every day, while Google's +1 button was used a whopping 5 billion times per day.

Finally, there were 1.3 billion smartphones in use worldwide by the end of 2012, 4 billion hours of video was being watched on YouTube monthly and a flabbergasting 7 petabytes of photos were added to Facebook every month.

Head over to Royal Pingdom to see the rest of the stats and tell us your estimates of what these numbers will look like at the end of 2013 in the comments!