The number of Internet users continues to increase as 2011 saw a third of the world online and over 800,000 users now signed up to the social networking site Facebook. Research carried out by analyst firm Pingdom says there are 2.1 billion people using the World Wide Web and 555 million websites now online.
They also revealed that the number of activated email address outweighs the number of online users as it currently stands at 3.146 billion and that 71% of email traffic was spam. In terms of email clients, Microsoft Outlook proved popular with 27% of the market share and Hotmail was best web-based email with 360 million users.
Interestingly, there are more social networking accounts than web users (2.4 billion) and there are 2.6 billion IM accounts online. YouTube saw one trillion annual video views in 2011. Twitter accounts rose to 225 million and Lady Gaga finished as the most popular person on the social networking site..
Looking across the world, North America had 271 million web users, Europe with 476 million and Asia leading the way with 922 million. Pingdom predicts that web usage will continue to grow in 2012.