The world seems to be embracing the Internet each passing day and now has over 2.4 billion Internet users, a report published by analytics site Pingdom shows. Asia leads the pack with 1.1 billion users, while Africa lags with only 167 million users.
In the social media category, Facebook remains the number one website with over 1 billion monthly active users, 47 percent of whom are female. Twitter is second with 200 million active monthly users.
The report further shows the average age of a Facebook user is 40.5 years, while Twitter’s is 37.7 years.
“Barack Obama’s tweet “Four more years” received over 819,000 retweets, making it the most retweet ever in Twitter’s history,” the report stated.
In mobile category, there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers globally, with 1.3 billion smartphones in use as at the end of 2012. Android is the most popular platform in smartphones, with 465 million phones operating on the platform, representing a 66 percent of the market share.
In the email category, there are 2.2 billion email users worldwide, with Gmail being the leading email provider worldwide with 425 million users. Out of the 144 billion email traffic per day worldwide, 61 percent of them are considered non-essential, with 68.8 percent of them categorized as spam.
Last year also saw over 5 billion photos uploaded to Instagram when it was barely months old after launching in September. Facebook received over 300 million photo uploads every day, while Instagram, on the other hand, received 58 photo uploads every second.
Pingdom projects that in 2013, people will access the Internet more via mobile devices while the social media will play “an increasingly important role in people’s lives”.
