15 Interesting Facts About the Internet

It makes me feel old that there are people alive who can vote who were born after the invention of the internet. That just seems crazy.

Anyways, here’s some fun and interesting facts I found about the Internet. Did you already know all this? Or is some of it surprising?  Enjoy.

1)  80% of all emails sent are spam.

2)   Recent studies show that by 2015, mobile is expected to overtake desktop use of the Internet.

3)   Twenty hours of video from around the world are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The first ever YouTube video was uploaded on April 23rd 2005,by Jawed Karim (one of the founders of the site) and was 18 seconds long, entitled “Me at the zoo”.

4)   78% of North Americans access the Internet regularly.

5)   The first emoticon is commonly credited to Kevin Mackenzie in 1979, but was a rather simple -) and didn’t really look like a face. 3 years later,  🙂

6)   People started spending more time on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace back in 2007; in 2009, there were more users on social networks than users of e-mail.

7)   Google was founded on September 4, 1998. Earliest known use on an American television show was in October 2002 on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The transitive verb, “to google” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006.

8)   The technology behind the Internet began back in the 1960′s at MIT. The first message ever to be transmitted was LOG.. why? The user had attempted to type LOGIN, but the network crashed after the enormous load of data of the letter G.

9)   In 2005, Google estimated the Internet contained some 5 million terabytes of data – that’s more than 1 gigabyte for each of Earth’s 4.5 billion trips around the sun.

10) In 2010 1 of every 8 married couples in the U.S. met online.

11) According to Google, the production of the electricity needed for a single internet search generates 200 milligrams of CO2.

12) The first ever banner ad invaded the Internet in 1994.

13) Mobile e-commerce now makes up 4% of total retail sales.

14)  The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie.  The name stands for “archive.” It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal.

15) In 2012, there were an average of 11 Billion total web searched per month in the US.

 

 SOURCES:

http://www.statisticbrain.com/internet-statistics/

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227062.600-is-the-net-hurting-the-environment.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)

http://mashable.com/2010/04/13/mobile-web-stats/

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/18-fun-interesting-facts-knew-internet/

http://www.androidauthority.com/eric-schmidt-predicts-internet-future-190416/

(Photo Credits: 1: luxuryluke 2: HTYLL 3: Stuck in Customs)