Happy 15th Birthday, Internet!

Last month, the Internet turned 15 years old. To refresh your memory, it was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (NOT Al Gore), who invented the "web" idea. The Internet as we know it today (from the mid-1990s) has its roots in a Defense Department project in 1969. The subject of the project was wartime digital communications.

The decision to make the code underlying the web free and available to all was perhaps one of the most momentous in recent business and social history.

As much as the Internet progressed technically in the 1990s, it revolutionized human communication and interaction. In just 15 years, the Internet has become part of the international vocabulary and is clearly destined for even greater prominence. It has been accepted by the business community, with a resulting explosion of service providers, consultants, books, and TV coverage.

Here are 20 “facts” that demonstrate the growing power and pervasiveness of the WWW. Caveat emptor: Each “fact” is subject to a great deal of discussion and argument so I welcome your research-based corrections.

1. Twenty percent of the world’s population, 1.17 to 1.33 billion people, use the Internet. North America (72%) has the highest penetration; Africa (5%) the lowest.

2. Only 30% (380 million) of Internet users are English-speaking, 14% (180 million) speak Chinese, 9% (113 million) speak Spanish. 46 million Internet users speak Arabic.

3. China’s Internet population increased by a third in 2006. According to state news agency Xinhua, the total number of Internet users in China has reached 132 million, of which 52 million have broadband connections. [Source: Guardian, December 2006]

4. Google’s market capitalization is around $180 billion, nearly three times the size of News Corporation. Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon are all in the Fortune 150 list.

5. According to Zenith Optimedia, between 2007 and 2010, Internet ad spending will increase by 69% and raise its market share from 8.1% to 11.5%. About $36 billion will be spent on Internet advertising globally in 2008, an increase of 24%.

6. YouTube is the world’s third largest site, behind Google and Yahoo. One in five of the world’s Internet users visit YouTube each day. Nearly half of US Internet users report visiting a video-sharing site like YouTube at least once.

7. Britney Spears was the most sought after celebrity on Google in 2007 and pilates was the most popular search in the fitness category. The most popular who, what and how queries were ‘Who is God’, ‘What is Love’ and ‘How to Kiss’.

8. Social networking is the fastest growing part of the Internet. There are 70 million active users on Facebook (the 8th most popular site in the world), more than 14 million photos are uploaded daily. The fourth most popular country for Facebook is Turkey with 3.3% of users. Australia is 6th with 2.7%. A Sophos poll of 600 workers found that 43% were unable to access Facebook at work, while an additional 7% reported that use of the site was restricted.

9. In 2007, global digital music sales rose 40% to $2.9 billion, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Downloaded music now makes up 15% of the recording industry’s sales.

10. Movie downloads could grow tenfold by 2012 and reach $6.3 billion worldwide during that period, according to a 2007 report by British market research firm Informa Telecoms & Media.

11. The iTunes store was launched on 28 April 2003; it has since sold more than four billion tracks and over 125 million TV episodes worldwide. It now rivals Wal-mart to be the biggest music retailer in the US. 150 million iPods have been sold worldwide since the device first appeared in October 2001. Nearly 40% of Americans now own an iPod or other mp3 player.

12. Wikipedia is the world’s 7th most popular Web site. The English version of Wikipedia has more than 2.3 million articles. Over a third of online US adults consult Wikipedia.

13. There are over 100 million Web sites, of which 74% are in the commercial or .com domain.

14. Total e-commerce sales in the US for 2007 were estimated at $136.4 billion, an increase of 19% from 2006. Total retail sales in 2007 increased 4% from 2006. E-commerce sales in 2007 accounted for 3.4% of total sales. E-commerce sales in 2006 accounted for 2.9% of total sales.

15. Core search engines Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.com collectively increased 15% in December 2007 in searches performed, compared to a year earlier, serving 9.6 billion searches in December 2007.

16. Since the beginning of 2007, Sen. Obama has raised more than $100 million online from Americans contributing $200 or less at a time, according to data compiled by the Campaign Finance Institute (Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2008)

17. In 2006, the average corporate email user received 126 messages a day, up 55% from 2003, according to the Radicati Group, a Palo Alto market research firm. By 2009, workers can expect to spend 41% of their time just managing emails. (Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2007)

18. More books are sold on the Internet than any other product and the number is increasing, research suggests. Polling company Nielsen Online surveyed 26,312 people in 48 countries. 41% of internet users had bought books online, it said. The largest percentage of people buying books in any country was South Korea at 58%. Twenty percent of US book sales and 17 percent of UK book sales are now made online.

19. Nielsen says more than eight out of ten Internet users purchased something in the last three months. That is a 40% increase on two years ago, to about 875 million shoppers. (BBC, January 21, 2008)

20. Newspapers’ online audiences are rising at twice the rate of the general Internet audience. Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 66.4 million unique visitors on average (40.7% of all Internet users) in the first quarter of 2008, a record number that represents a 12.3% increase over the same period a year ago, according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.