Internet 2009 in numbers
What happened with the Internet in 2009? — How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.
Context & Ripple Effects
This roundup extends a measurement lineage that started with useit.com's one-billion-Internet-user count back in 2005: Royal Pingdom consolidates the year's headline figures — websites added, emails sent, total users worldwide — into a single post rather than leaving them scattered across operator reports.
Its timing matters too: it lands weeks after the San Francisco Chronicle's qualitative year-in-review declaring social networks come of age, so Pingdom's tallies supply the quantitative backbone for a narrative other outlets had already told qualitatively.
First-order effects
- Bloggers, analysts and marketers gain one citable scoreboard for 2009's web, email and audience figures, replacing a hunt across separate ISP, registrar and vendor statistics.
Second-order effects
- The annual-roundup format is easily imitated, and the year-over-year structure makes each edition self-renewing: any future tally re-traffic the prior year's numbers as the comparison baseline.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, aggregate Internet metrics become an informal industry scorecard — whoever aggregates the counts shapes the reference points that ad budgets, product plans and next year's retrospectives are argued from.
The trend: Internet-scale activity is becoming an annually benchmarked statistic, with aggregators like Royal Pingdom converting raw counts into recurring editorial franchises.