If there any schmucks around who still believe that the Internet is not a big deal, here are some stats (from Pingdom) to disabuse them of such quaint notions:

Internet Users
* 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010)
* 825.1 million – Internet users in Asia
* 475.1 million – Internet users in Europe
* 266.2 million – Internet users in North America
* 204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America/Caribbean
* 110.9 million – Internet users in Africa
* 63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East
* 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia

SI: Given that the population of India and China alone are 1 billion + each, we should expect to see a significant jump in the Asian Internet user base in the coming years.

Email
* 107 trillion – No of emails sent on the Internet in 2010
* 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day
* 1.88 billion – No of email users worldwide
* 2.9 billion – No of email accounts worldwide (25% corporate)

SI: The growing popularity of texting, Facebook and Twitter should see a plateauing or even a decline in e-mail usage (spam excluded, of course).

Web Sites
* 255 million – No of web sites as of December 2010
* 21.4 million – Web sites added in 2010

SI: Expect to see more Asian business climb on the web site bandwagon.

Videos
* 2 billion – No of YouTube videos watched per day
* 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute

Social Media
* 152 million – No of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse)
* 25 billion – No of tweets sent on Twitter in 2010
* 7.7 million – People following Lady Gaga
* 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010
* 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.

SI: Fewer blogs will come up given the high cost and time associated with keeping them updated constantly.

Facebook’s popularity should continue to spiral making rivals like MySpace, BigAdda and Orkut completely irrelevant.

Click here to see the full Pingdom Post.

Data Source: Uptime monitoring services provider Pingdom