23 Amazing Internet Consumption Statistics

The world is growing smaller every day. From a home office, any entrepreneur can create a global business with just a computer and a good idea. Families can video chat in real time halfway across the world. How is this happening? The internet, that’s how.

Asia leads the world in internet consumption by using 45.7% of the total available resources.

Internet Consumption

On every continent where there is a full-time population, internet usage when up in 2014. Sometimes the amounts of internet consumption were up thousands of percentage points. What does this mean? That we’re using the internet more than ever, but yet billions of people still don’t have any access or their access is very limited.

• The United States leads the world with internet consumption saturation with 87.7% of the population having regular access to the internet.
• Between 2000-2014, more than 100 million new internet users came online on the Asian continent.
• The largest growth rate since 2000 has been seen in Africa, with a nearly 7,000% increase in online users.
• The total number of internet consumers in Africa in 2000: 4.5 million. In 2014: 297.8 million.
• From a global perspective, just 42.3% of the world has regular access to the internet today.
• North America has seen the smallest increase in population usage since the year 2000, but the continent also had the highest level of saturation at that point in time.
• Despite the massive growth, only 1 in 4 people on the African continent are internet consumers.
• Even though their saturation rate is less than 35%, the Asian continent still accounts for nearly half of all internet traffic.
• In homes where the average household income is $75,000 or higher, more than 99% of homes have the internet.

Since the turn of the century, innovations in the mobile sector especially have increased the ability for people to access the internet. No longer do people need to sit and wait up to 5 minutes for a dial-up modem to connect. With speeds above 100/20 on broadband connections, even live streaming TV has become an option for internet consumption today. Despite all of this advances, however, there is still one disturbing statistic of note: more than half of the world’s population still does not have regular access to the internet.

How Are We Using The Internet Today?

• There are over 100 hours of video footage being uploaded to YouTube in every minute of every day.
• Over the last 5 years, the amount of information that has been uploaded to the internet has multiplied by 8x.
• Compared to the iPhone, iPad growth in internet traffic is 3x higher.
• 500 million. That’s the amount of photographs that are uploaded to social networks every day.
• Smartphone users check their phone for updates more than 150x per day.
• Despite Americans having the greatest saturation of internet use per capita, there are 14 countries which actually share more information online than Americans do.
• 68% of adults connect to the internet with mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers.
• 90% of internet users say the internet has been a good thing for them personally and only 6% say it has been a bad thing.

We use the internet for everything. From work to social connectivity and networking to games and everything in-between, internet consumption is more than just videos of cats, unicorns, and rainbows. This trend is only going to grow stronger as more people get online and humanity reaches full connectivity.

Are We Addicted To The Internet?

• 53%. That’s the percentage of regular internet users who say that the internet would be difficult to give up. That’s 4 percentage points higher than cell phone owners.
• 61% of people use the internet for work-related tasks every day.
• 67% of internet users say their online communication with family and friends has generally strengthened those relationships.
• 76% of internet users said the people they witnessed or encountered online were mostly kind.
• 56% of internet users say they have seen an online group come together to help a person or a community solve a problem.

Although comment boards make it seem like the internet is filled with anonymous trolls, that really isn’t the case for a majority of the internet. Most people find that their internet consumption habits have benefited their lives in some major ways. What will the internet be like when everyone gets connected? That’s a day we can all be excited about.