Happy Internaut Day! Let's celebrate the occasion with some mind-blowing facts about the World Wide Web

Happy World Internaut day! 23 August has been celebrated as World Internaut Day since the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his associates in 1991. The word internaut comes from internet and nauta, which is Greek for traveller (Thank you, dartadrian). It’s defined as a “designer, operator, or technically capable user of the internet.” This means that just the fact that you’re reading this on our website means you’re an internaut. The internet was envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee as a global, hyperlinked information system. By 1985, the first DNS system was setup in Europe. By 1988, America and Europe were connected by the internet. By 1989, the first concept of a global “web” was proposed; it comprised of a linked database of searchable text and embedded links. By 1991, the internet was unleashed on the world. In 2016, the internet is everywhere.  Let’s celebrate World Internaut Day with some mind-blowing stats:

• At least 40 percent of the world has access to the internet
• There are 3.4 billion internauts as of 1 July 2016, half of these are on Facebook.
• There are at least 1 billion websites on the WWW
• The internet is host to almost one zetabyte of data
• The average global connection speed is 5.7 Mb/s
• South Korea offers the highest average connection speed of 26.7 Mb/s
• India’s average connection speed is 2.5 Mb/s
• At least 48.5 percent of internet traffic in 2015 was generated only by bots
• As a whole, humanity tweets 7,300 times a second
• We transfer and access 37,000 GB of data per second
• We search for 56,000 items per second on Google
• We consume 129,000 YouTube videos per second
• We send 2.5 million emails per second
• Lolcats is worth $2 million
• Searching for ‘cats’ on Google will get you 680 million hits
• BitTorrent “only” makes up about 25 percent of the internet traffic in Asia-Pacific, same as YouTube.

Today, a world without the internet is inconceivable.