Internet Facts

A famous comparison claims radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users, television took 13 years, and the World Wide Web just 4 years—though these widely-cited numbers from a Morgan Stanley report lack precise methodology, they illustrate a real trend of accelerating technology adoption.

There are approximately 1,319,872,109 people on the Internet.

On eBay, there are an average of $680 worth of transactions each second.

E-mail has been around longer than the World Wide Web.

In 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution declaring that the same rights people have offline must also be protected online, effectively recognizing internet access as essential to exercising human rights.

There are approximately 1.06 billion instant messaging accounts worldwide.

The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com.

Domain names are being registered at a rate of more than one million names every month.

The first banner advertising was used in 1994.

Yahoo! was originally called 'Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web'.

Iceland has the most Internet users per capita of any country in the world with over 86 percent of people using the Web, compared with only 69 percent of Americans.

It would take 76 work days (8 hours a day) for the average person to read the Terms and Conditions they agree to in a year.

Anthony Greco, aged 18, became the first person arrested for spim (unsolicited instant messages) on February 21,2005.

One of the first items ever bought and sold over the internet was marijuana, sold by Stanford students to MIT students in the early 1970s.

MDIF, a New York based non-profit organisation, is planning to beam free Wi-Fi to the entire world from space.

One of the longest early domain name disputes was the fight for PETA.org. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sued Michael Doughney, who had registered the domain for a parody site called 'People Eating Tasty Animals' — the legal battle lasted from 1995 to 2000.

IMDb is one of the oldest websites on the internet, and began on Usenet in 1990 as a list of "actresses with beautiful eyes".

In 2013, AOL declared that they still made over $500 million a year through dial-up internet subscriptions.

Kissenger is a pig-shaped robotic device that transmits kiss sensations over the internet using pressure sensors and actuators, allowing long-distance couples to share physical affection.

The cat featured in the popular internet meme "grumpy cat" has a permanently grumpy face due to feline dwarfism. Her real name is Tardar Sauce.

CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

Donald Glover got his rapper name ‘Childish Gambino’ from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Coca-Cola owns all the domain names that can be read as 'ahh' — from ahh.com all the way up to a domain with 62 h's. They registered all 61 variations for a 2013 marketing campaign called 'The Ahh Effect.'

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has never profited directly from his invention—and he even gave away the code for free so the internet could grow.