The world’s population was 7.93 billion people Earth in April 2022, with 57 percent residing in urban areas. Mobile users now number 5.32 billion people, equating to 67 percent of the total global population. Smartphones account for roughly 4 in 5 of the mobile handsets in use today. Internet users number 5.00 billion people with the global total increasing by almost 200 million over the past year. Of this, 63 percent of the world’s population is now online, but there are still important differences in the “quality” of internet access around the world. There are 4.65 billion social media users around the world today, which equates to 58.7 percent of the total global population. However, if we focus just on ‘eligible’ audiences aged 13 and above, data suggests that roughly three-quarters of all those people who can use social media already do.
The journey only began about 50 years ago, with the first transmission of data via an internet-like network taking place in October 1969.
Email followed in the early 1970s, but it wasn’t until Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web some 20 years later that adoption of the internet really started to gain momentum.
When the first website went live in August 1991, fewer than 4 million people around the world used the internet, but internet users grew quickly over the following decade.
The global user total passed 50 million shortly after the removal of commercial internet restrictions in 1995, and by the turn of the millennium, well over a quarter-of-a-billion people were already online.
The billionth internet user likely came online sometime in 2005, but it only took another 6 years for that global user figure to double to 2 billion.
By early 2017, more than half of the world’s total population was using the internet.
These trends indicate that internet user growth rates have slowed in recent years, but that’s perhaps to be expected now that more than 6 in 10 people are online.
The latest data show that internet users have still increased by almost 200 million over the past 12 months though, representing year-on-year growth of slightly over 4 percent.
The latest wave of research from GlobalWebIndex (GWI) reveals that the world’s internet users now spend an average of 6 hours and 53 minutes online each day.
However, the latest figures mean that the world’s 5 billion internet users still spend a combined total of more than 2 trillion minutes online every single day.
For context, the typical internet user now spends more than 40 percent of their waking life online.
And what’s more, with the typical user spending more than 48 hours online each week, billions of people now spend more time using connected devices than they spend at work.
On average, younger people tend to spend more time online than older generations do, with young women spending the greatest amount of time using the internet.
GWI’s research reveals that women aged 16 to 24 now spend an average of 8 hours per day online, meaning that many women in this demographic now spend as much time using the internet as they do sleeping.
At the other end of the spectrum, men in the Baby Boomer generation say that they spend just under 5½ hours per day online, but that still equates to roughly a third of their waking hours.
Despite these impressive figures, however, there are still 2.9 billion who do not use the internet in April 2022, representing 37 percent of all the people on Earth.
Southern Asia is home to the largest offline population, with more than a third of the world’s “unconnected” living in the region. 744 million people remain offline in India, equating to more than half (53 percent) of the country’s population, and more than a quarter of the world’s unconnected. Meanwhile, 145 million people in Pakistan do not currently have internet access (63.7 percent of the population), and 114 million people remain offline in Bangladesh, equating to more than two-thirds of the country’s population (67.9 percent).
China still has a large unconnected population too, despite the country’s internet users now numbering well over 1 billion. Roughly 415 million people remain offline in China, equating to 28.7 percent of the country’s total population. For context, China’s offline population accounts for just over 14 percent of the world’s unconnected in April 2022.
Reference:
Digital 2022 Global Overview Report, Global Statshot, DataReportal/We Are Social/Hootsuite, Simon Kemp, 21 April 2022
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