Internet 2009 by the numbers

by Michael Alexander

Got any idea how many new Web sites were launched in 2009? Me neither.

Royal Pingdom, however, figures 47 million Web sites were added to the Internet in 2009, bringing the total number of Web sites on the Internet to 234 million. The company culled stats from Web hosting sites, domain name registrars, market research companies and several other data sources and created a 2009 snapshot of the Internet.

Among its findings for 2009:

  • 90 trillion: Number of emails sent
  • 81.8 million: Number of .com domain names
  • 1.73 billion: Internet users worldwide (Sept. 2009)
  • 2.6 million: Number of viruses, Trojans and other sorts of malicious software
  • 126 million: Number of blogs

Internet users by region

Royal Pingdom is in the business of providing enterprise Web uptime monitoring services.

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eBay says iPhone/iPod touch shoppers went crazy over the holiday season . The number of items bought via eBay’s  free mobile app this ebay-iphone-app year was triple last year’s holiday volume. In 2009, eBay buyers and sellers are generating more than half a billion dollars of  mobile transactions. Nearly 6 million people have eBay’s app on their “iDevice” and shoppers are making 750,000 unique visits a day to eBay. Mobile purchases this season range from designer handbags to a $75,000 1966 Chevrolet Corvette, the company says.

In 2009, an item sold every 2 seconds via eBay mobile app worldwide with luxury items a favorite of shoppers this holiday season. Recent mobile transactions in the US include:

  • $19,108 for a 23-foot deck boat
  • $10,025 for 250 grams of pure gold
  • $10,000 for a Boston grand piano made by Steinway
  • $3,888 for a Hermes Kelly bag
  • $770 for a Jean Paul Gaultier wool and leather coat
  • $600 for a pair of Christian Louboutin, camel-colored patent leather pumps

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Yahoo! says it will get more cozy with Facebook by integrating the two in a way that helps users stay in and touch and grab more meaningful content when they want it.

The big idea is to further the Yahoo! Open Strategy initiative and to “make the two experiences more open, social and personally relevant for the more than 500 million people that visit Yahoo! each month,” says Jim Stoneham, vice president of Communities for Yahoo!

The partnership will give consumers richer experiences on Yahoo!, including in Yahoo! Mail and on properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Finance. It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content–such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories–with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!.

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg follows up on privacy controls announced in July

December 2, 2009

Facebook’s head honcho, Mark Zuckerberg, said back in July the company was preparing to do a better job of locking down the privacy of its users.
Facebook now has 350 million users worldwide, Zuckerberg says.
In an open letter, published last night, Zuckerberg finally got around to detailing just what those privacy controls will look like.
Writes [...]

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Tweet and be seen

December 1, 2009

I think augmented reality for smartphones like the iPhone 3GS is very, very cool. Now, comes Twitter 360, a new app that enables you to visualize your Twitter friends who are located near you using AR (it works in combination with the iPhone’s camera).
It’s one of the first apps to use Twitter’s new geotagging feature [...]

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Searching for cultural signs o’ the times

December 1, 2009

Every year, Google publishes its year-end Zeitgeist. The list is out and no surprise: Michael Jackson tops the list for fastest-rising search term in the worldwide and entertainment categories.

Last year put Sarah Palin at the top of the worldwide list, followed by Beijing 2008. The last Olympics is one of the most rapidly falling search [...]

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Pizza Hut tops list of brand apps with 1 million downloads, says Forbes Magazine

November 30, 2009

Forbes Magazine named the Pizza Hut iPhone app the #1 Branded Mobile Application of 2009 in an article released this week.
In 2009, the Pizza Hut iPhone app also was named the winner of two MMA awards for Best Mobile Display Campaign and Best Emerging Technology Campaign in North America, as well as an [...]

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Bing’s top searches for 2009—so far

November 30, 2009

Now, here’s a surprise (yawn): The top trending search topics on Bing  are:

Michael Jackson
Twitter
Swine Flu
Stock Market
Farrah Fawcett
Patrick Swayze
Cash for Clunkers
Jon and Kate Gosselin
Billy Mays
Jaycee Dugard

Bing plans to release a more comprehensive list before the year’s out. Sneak preview: Perez Hilton already is the most searched [...]

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The social equality of men and women

November 30, 2009

Ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?
Market researchers at Royal Pingdom tracked down this information for 19 leading social network and news sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.
Here’s RP’s breakdown of men vs. [...]

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New media’s downs and ups

November 30, 2009

Historically, young women and men who sought to thrive in publishing made their way to Manhattan. Once there, they were told, they would work in marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks and then one day, if they did all of that without whimper or complaint, they would magically be granted access to a [...]

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