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How Big is The World Wide Web?

Actually a hard question to answer, and requires a bit of research to get the hard numbers.

Generally, it is big, very big. Every month a company called Netcraft does an estimate of how many websites are on the Internet:
July 2011: 357,292,065
June 2011: 346,004,403
May 2011: 324,697,205
April 2011: 312,693,296
March 2011: 298,002,705
Febraury 2011: 284,842,077
January 2011: 273,301,445

That is a jump of over 83,990,620 websites since the beginning of this year (WOW!).

Then there is the number of people with access to the Internet. For most businesses the important point is that the USA is pretty well wired in (though not the most by percentage or number).

For some actual hard numbers of users I went to the International Telecommunication Union (the ITU).

The International numbers look like this:
2010: 2,044 million (seems like a lot but only about 30% of the world)
2009: 1,805 million
2008: 1,575 million
2007: 1,374 million
2006: 1,151 million
2005: 1,023 million
2004: 914 million
2003: 785 million
2002: 677 million
2001: 495 million
2000: 394 million

That is a doubling of users in just 5 years (from 2005 to 2010).

However, individual countries vary greatly (these are from the ITU as well). Take a look at the residents online in the following continents for 2010:
Asia: 825.1 million (China alone is 420 million more than any other continent bar Europe)
Europe: 475.1 million
North America: 270 million (USA alone is about 230 million)
Latin America/Caribbean: 204.7 million
Africa: 110.9 million
Middle East: 63.2 million
Oceania/Australia: 21.3 million

More impressively the percentage of people in the country who are on the Internet vary greatly from country to country, for example:
Iceland: 95%
Norway: 93%
United Kingdom: 85%
Switzerland: 83%
France: 80%
Japan: 80%
United States: 79%
Australia: 76%
Ireland: 69%
Spain: 66%
Italy: 53%
Greece: 44%
Russia: 43%
China: 34% (remember that huge number above, well they have a ginormous population)
Mexico: 31%
South Africa: 12%
Zimbabwe: 11%
India: 7.5%
Afghanistan: 4% (actually not too surprising)

So, while the Internet is HUGE currently, it actually has a lot more room to grow. With new technology developing constantly (smartphones and tablets showing up in greater and greater numbers) I don't see these numbers slowing down at all.

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