IN today’s world, life without internet is unimaginable. The internet has changed the world and the way we live.
In 1995, less than 1% of the world population or 16 million people has an internet connection. In the next two decades, the number of internet users grew to 3.37 billion in 2015 from 16 million in 1995.
Internet saw its first billion users in 2005, followed by the second billion in 2010 and third billion in 2014.
In 2019, there are more than 4.5 billion users online and as of January 2021, about 61% of the world’s population or 4.81 billion people is already online. In fact, 346 million people came online for the first time in the past one year.
Restricted movement order and lockdown imposed by governments around the world to curb the spreading of COVID-19 virus have contributed to the rise in internet users, especially social media users.
This has resulted in the increased in social media users as social media sites are used by more than two-thirds of all internet users.
According to a report released by Hootsuite, the global leader in social media management, there are now 4.2 billion social media users around the world.
In the past 12 months, this figure has grown by 490 million, delivering year-on-year (yoy) growth of more than 13%, according to the report entitled Digital 2021.
The number of social media users is now equivalent to more than 53% of the world’s total population.
This means that more than half of the world’s population now uses social media. For the first time, there are more people using social media than those who doesn’t use social media.
During 2020, averagely more than 1.3 million new users joined social media every day or an equivalent to about 15 new users every single second.
Furthermore, the report found that a typical social media user spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media each day, equating to roughly one waking day of their life every week.
When added together, the world’s social media users spend a total of 3.7 trillion hours on social media in 2021 – equivalent to more than 420 million years of combined human existence.
To recap, social media has managed to infiltrate half of the 7.7 billion people in the world since its inception in 1996. Total user base for social media platforms tripled in the last 10 years to 3.81 billion users in 2020 from 970 million in 2010.
Meanwhile, Facebook remains the world’s most used social platform with about 2.8 billion monthly active users as of 4Q 2020, followed by YouTube and WhatsApp. Facebook-owned apps account for four of the top five most used social platforms globally. – Feb 7, 2021
