The internet has been one of our most transformative and fast-growing technologies. Globally the number of internet users increased from only 413 million in 2000 to over 3.4 billion in 2016. The one billion barrier was crossed in 2005. Every day over the past five years, an average of 640,000 people went online for the first time.1
But how many people from each country are online? In the maps we see the total number of users by country, and the percentage of a country’s population who are users.
China and India take the top two slots despite having only 50 and 26 percent online, respectively. The top six countries by users (and the only countries with over 100 million) in 2016/17 were2:
- China = 765 million
- India = 391 million
- United States = 245 million
- Brazil = 126 million
- Japan = 116 million
- Russia = 109 million
A chart of the top 10 countries is here. Clicking on any country in map shows how its users have changed over time.
The internet has been growing at an incredible rate; many countries – including India, Bangladesh, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Malawi – have doubled the number of users in the last 3 years alone.
Around half of the world is not yet online – as Max wrote, the internet’s history has only just begun, but with 27,000 new users every hour, many will experience it for the first time soon.
