World Wide Web Turns Thirty

The World Wide Web turns 30 during 2019. It took 16 years to add the first billion users, six more years to add the second billion and is now adding a billion users every 2.7 years.
During 2014, 26% of users connected to the web using a cellular phone. Today that has grown to 48%.
There are 11 new users on the web every second. The most considerable growth of internet users is in India, which had almost 100 million new internet users during 2018, a 21% increase. That represents 25% of all new internet users in the world for last year.
About 40% of internet users now interface with the web using voice. In China and India, over half of users interface the web with voice.


GlobalWebIndex reports that 92% of Internet users (about 4 billion) now watch video each month. Incidentally, there are an estimated 6 billion people around the world have access to a television.

Web Birthday

The internet as we know it has profoundly changed all of our lives, but many forget how young it is and how quickly it evolved. The web, or "world wide web" turns 27 years old on December 20. On that date in 1990, British engineer and scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who once made a computer out of an old television set, launched the world's first website, running on a NeXT computer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open license, as a way to maximize its dissemination. Making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser, and a library of code, the web quickly flourished to what it is today.


Incidentally, the web neutrality act that was overturned yesterday was just put in place during 2015. Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc., grew and flourished before the government took over the web and the vote to keep the government out of it will not be the end of the world as some pundits will have us believe. Evidence of government control can be found in many other areas, such as post office, student loans, higher education, taxes, healthcare, banking, and more. The internet will not end because the government decided to not be in charge of it.

Top Ten Web Facts

There are 14.3 trillion web pages on the World Wide Web.

68.8% of all email traffic is spam. (back in 2008, 53.8 trillion spam emails were sent)

51% of all spam is about pharmaceuticals, the top category of all spam.

30.8% used Internet Explorer in 2012 (in 2008 it was 70%)

43% of the top 1 million websites are hosted in the U.S.

44.8 % of internet users live in Asia

11.4% of internet users live in North America

68.4% of smart phones use Android operating system (introduced Sept 2008) vs. iPhone (introduced June 2007) 19.4%

4 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month

In 2012, there were 2.7 billion likes on Facebook each day and 5 billion Google's +1 button  each day.

Web and Internet Defined

Internet technically began to exist in the form we know it on January 1, 1983 when its predecessor, Arpanet began using TCP/IP – the system of network communication still used today.

The web was invented by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. The World Wide Web is made up of servers (which serve the pages) and clients (like Firefox, Safari, and IE) which display the page.

The Internet is the set of technologies beneath the web which enable the web to exist. If the Internet did not exist, the web would not function. If the web did not exist, the Internet would still function.

Other programs that use the Internet and have nothing to do with the web are email, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), most internet messaging programs, newsgroups, BitTorrent, telnet, FTP, etc.