Internet growth by year
| Year | Internet users | % of world | Emails a day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | 1.03 B | 15.6% | - |
| 2010 | 1.99 B | 28.4% | - |
| 2015 | 2.97 B | 39.9% | 205 B |
| 2020 | 4.72 B | 60.1% | 306 B |
| 2024 | 5.80 B | 71.2% | 361.6 B |
| 2025 | 6.05 B | 73.6% | 376.4 B |
| 2026 (April) | 6.12 B | 73.8% | 392.5 B (forecast) |
| 2028 (forecast) | - | - | 424.2 B |
Users and shares: ITU via Our World in Data, 2026 from DataReportal. Emails: Radicati Group email statistics reports (2015 and 2020 from earlier editions).
Internet usage facts
| Statistic | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| People using the internet (2025) | 6.0 billion (74%) | ITU Facts and Figures 2025 |
| Internet users (April 2026) | 6.12 billion | DataReportal Digital 2026 |
| Time online per day (ages 16+) | 6 h 38 min | DataReportal Digital 2026 |
| Social media user identities | 5.79 billion | DataReportal, April 2026 |
| Emails sent and received per day | 392.5 billion | Radicati, 2026 forecast |
| Google searches per year | 5 trillion+ | Google, March 2025 |
| Spam share of email | 44.99% | Kaspersky 2025 |
| Websites (hostnames) | 1,494,915,628 | Netcraft, July 2026 |
| Mobile network data traffic | 210 EB a month | Ericsson Mobility Report, Q1 2026 |
| App downloads (2025) | 149 billion | Sensor Tower State of Mobile 2026 |
| YouTube hours watched per day | 1 billion+ | YouTube (2017, latest official) |
| People still offline | 2.2 billion | ITU 2025 |
How the counters work
Each counter takes a yearly or daily total from the source above, turns it into a rate per second and multiplies by the seconds since midnight UTC. The page is rendered with the value at the moment you load it; your browser then keeps it moving. Real traffic is not flat through the day, so read the counters as daily averages.
Three counters rest on old official numbers because the companies stopped publishing them: posts on X (500 million a day, Twitter 2013), Instagram uploads (95 million a day, 2016) and YouTube watch time (1 billion hours a day, 2017). We label them as estimates; the real figures today are almost certainly higher.