History of the Internet and WWW -- Part 8: Statistics

F History of the Internet and WWW -- Part 8: Statistics

Andy Grove, the boss of Intel, ... recently summed up the online pioneers’ attitude when asked about the return on investment (ROI) from his firm’s Internet ventures: “... This is Columbus in the New World. What was his ROI?”

by Christopher Anderson, The Economist, 1997

History of Internet and WWW:
The Roads and Crossroads
of Internet History
by Gregory R. Gromov

"Subjects." There are no "subjects." Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Ted Nelson

Simplicity almost never happens by itself; it must be designed.

Ted Nelson

Lawrence G. Roberts

larry11gif.GIF (8546 bytes)

One of the leading founders of the basic technical basement of Internet - packet network: "... was responsible for the design, initiation, planning and development of ARPANET, the world’s first major packet network, the predecessor to Internet, while the Director of Information Processing Techniques for DARPA. After ARPA, ... founded the world’s first packet data comm carrier, Telenet, and was the CEO from 1973 to 1980. Telenet was sold to GTE in 1979 and subsequently became the data division of Sprint..."

Anthony M. Rutkowski

... global enterprise strategist, public official, organization leader, consultant, lecturer, and author in both the Internet and telecom worlds ...

Growth of the Internet: Statistics

The basic question: How many people are online worldwide as of August 2001... And the number is 513.41 million.

DATE NUMBER % POP SOURCE

August 2001 513.41 million 8.46 Nua Ltd

August 2000 368.54 million 6.07 Nua Ltd

August 1999 195.19 million 4.64 Nua Ltd

Sept 1998 147 million 3.6 Nua Ltd

November 1997 76 million 1.81 Reuters

December 1996 36 million .88 IDC

December 1995 16 million .39 IDC

World Total 513.41 million

Africa 4.15 million

Asia/Pacific 143.99 million

Europe 154.63 million

Middle East 4.65million

Canada & USA 180.68 million

Latin America 25.33 million

Compiled from: Nua Internet Surveys

Source: Global Internet Statistics (by Language)

	Internet access (M)	%'age world online pop.	2003 (est. in M)	Total pop. (M)	GDP ($B)	%'age of world economy	GDP per capita (K)	Net Hosts
English	228	40.2%	270	567	$13,812	33.4%
*Non-English*	339	59.8%	510	5633	$27,590	66.6%

*European Languages* (non-English)	192.3	33.9%	259.3	1,218	$12,550	30.3%
Catalan	1.9		2.2	6.6
Czech	2.2		3	12	$53		$5.1	214
Dutch	11.8	2.1%	13	23.6	$570		$24.2	2485
Finnish	2.1		3.5	6	$127		$24.4	945
French	22.0	3.9%	28	77	$1734	4.2%	$21.5	2388
German	38.6	6.8%	49	100	$2421	5.8%	$24.9	3784
Greek	1.6		3	12	$184		$16.9	182
Hungarian	1.3		3	14.5	$96		$9.4	211
Italian	20.2	3.6%	27	62	$1471	3.6%	$24.7	2313
Polish	6.7		8.5	44	$306		$7.8	654
Portuguese	14.9	2.6%	26	176	$1472	3.6%	$8.34	1909
Romanian	0.8		1.2	26	$98		$4.4	69
Russian	11.5	2.0%	15	167	$730	1.8%	$5.0	415
Danish	3.2			5.4	$176		$32.9	707
Icelandic	0.2			.3	$6		$23.5	47
Norwegian	2.5			5	$126		$27.7	630
Swedish	6.2			9	$223		$22.3	1330
Scandinavian languages (total)	12.0	2.1%	13	19.7	$525	1.3%	26.0	2714
Slovak	0.7		1.5	5.6	$47		$8.7	69
Slovenian	0.6		1	2	$22.9		$10.9	26
Spanish	40.8	7.2%	53	350	$3684	8.9%	$11.0	3241
Turkish	3.9		7	67.4	$454		$6.7	140
Ukranian	0.8		2	47	$115		$2.3	56
TOTAL EUROPEAN LANGUAGES (excl. English)	192.3	33.9%	259	1,218	$14,112	33.9%		24,529

ASIAN LANGUAGES
Arabic	4.4	0.8%	6	300	$678	1.6%	$4.2	95
Chinese	55.5	9.8%	125	874	$5370	13.0%	$5.4	2388
Hebrew	1.9		2.5	5.2	$132		$21.0	223
Japanese	52.1	9.2%	75	125	$3,315	8.0%	$26.1	7118
Korean	25.2	4.4%	35	78	$835	2.0	$17.3	440
Malay	4.8		7	229	$835	2.0%	$3.7	95
Thai	2.3		3	46	$453		$7.3	81
TOTAL ASIAN LANGUAGES	146.2	26.1%	254					10,440

TOTAL WORLD	560		762	6,200	$41,400
Source: Global Reach

ISP Sources of Revenue: early beginning ...

1996

1997

1998

Internet Access

1.21

1.21

5.53

Web Hosting & Security

0.17

0.17

0.99

Electronic Commerce

0.01

0.01

0.24

Revenue above: In billions of dollars. Source: Forrester Research, Riggs, B (April 28, 1997) Hard Times for the Small ISP, LanTimes. 55-58 Online quote: The Internet: from Backbone to End-Use

Great AmeriNet Dream ... as it was just a couple of years ago:

... e-commerce sales could balloon to $37.5 billion this (1998 - ed.) year, according to market researcher Jupiter Communications in New York.
by Jon Swartz, Jamie Beckett, SF Chronicle, November 25, 1998

Projections for the year 2002 from Forrester and Jupiter currently range between USD200 to USD300 billion .

CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chambers reckons that figure will be closer to 1 trillion . At Networld 98, industry analyst Nicholas Lippis announced that online commerce would generate USD1.5 trillion of US GDP by 2002.

Paradigm Shifts, Nua Internet Surveys,November 2nd 1998

and what happened in real life:

E-Commerce Growth Rates
and 2001 Monthly Spending
(U.S.)

Month Yearly
Growth
(2000-2001) 2001 Monthly
Spending
(billions)

April 73.1% $4.5

May 103.5% $5.4

June 71.2% $5.3

July 39.0% $4.9

August 57.2% $5.6

September 53.7% $4.7

October 25.0% $4.6

November 10.1% $5.3

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings and Harris Interactive

$13.8 billion spent online during the 2001 holiday season

New York and Rochester, NY, January 7, 2002—Over the eight weeks of November and December, Americans spent $13.8 billion online. A Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive SM, and Nielsen//NetRatings (www.nielsen-netratings.com) eSpending report revealed this latest economic information. In comparison, $12 billion was spent during the 2000 holiday season

“Online holiday spending continued its growth, despite pressures from the slowing U.S. economy.

Source: Business Channels

Number of the Web pages in July 1998: 300 millions,
1.5 Million Web Pages Born Daily,
50% of all traffic goes to the top 900 Web sites currently available.
     by Alexa Internet, InternetWorld online, 31-Aug-1998 10:08:46 EDT,

Percentage increase in Internet traffic, per month: 30

- Number of security incidents reported to the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center in 1995: 2412
- Number reported in 1988: 6

Number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S. and Canada, in August, 1997: 4,133

Number of ISP, worldwide in July, 1996: 3,054

Average number of customers at an ISP: 1,850
          Data source: Win Trees

The Stats Map of Net History

30 Years of theNet History in Brief Stats Story

Date Hosts Domains* WebSites WHR(%)**

Jul 01 126,000,000 30,000,000 28.200,000 22.0

Jul 98 37,000,000     4,300,000 4,270,000 12.0

Jul 97 19,540,000   1,301,000 1,200,000 6.2

Jul 96 12,881,000       488,000 300,000 2.3

Jul 95 6,642,000      120,000 25,000 0.4

Jul 94 3,212,000         46,000 3,000 0.1

Jul 93 1,776,000          26,000 150 0.01

Jul 92 992,000         16,300 50 0.005

Jul 89 130,000           3,900 -

Jul 81 210

1969 4

� Gregory Gromov 1996-2002

Data sources: Network Wizards (US), Dr A D Marshall (UK) and some of the Netvalley estimations

*/ The total number of the all types of Domains (commercial -- com.; non-profit organizations -- org.; educational ... --- edu.; ... etc.)
**/The WebSites to Hosts Ratio (WHR):
WHR estimates the percent of content active part of Net community. By other words, WHR reflects what is the percent of Web surfing people that are trying to become the Web authors by creating their own Web sites. So we ( - G.R.G) consider the WHR as a creative temperature of Web

"...40 percent of global Internet traffic either originated or terminating in California."
Pacific Bell - December, 1995

... traffic over the Internet
doubling every 100 days

By Frances Hong, Internet Capacity Major Theme For 1999 - Study, NEW YORK (Reuters), December 6, 1998

Net traffic will quadruple in 2001

Larry Roberts, Forbes, December 10, 2001

Internet traffic grew more than 100% in 2001
from 48 PB/month to 100 PB/month and
this growth continues in 2002.
Majority of users -- 84%, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's report: A Nation Online, Feb 2002 -- connecting to the Internet for email or instant messaging services...
- by John Ryan of RHK, Inc. 2002

Internet Traffic Growth by Larry Roberts

-Traffic is for US backbone network, not including local calls, for both Internet and PSTN;
-Traffic growth is higher than host growth because the traffic/host ratio growth at 14 percentage per year

... more data than voice conversations now take place daily on British Telecommunications Plc's domestic network ... traditional telephone calls were being replaced by electronic mail (e-mail) ... ... increased use of e-mail, electronic commerce (e-commerce) and multimedia services in addition to conventional and mobile telephony would double the size of the British communications market from its current $49.62 billion within five years ...

Yahoo! News: Technology Headlines, November 5, 1998

Internet Hosts by Tony Rutkowski
The Host means iniquely reachable Internet connected computer

The picture above is the slide of the Internet Trends' collection --
one of the most impressive of Internet stats related slide collections I've ever seen.
Check it out!

Why Hosts?

Because there is not any other ways to count the Internet populations at all: "No one has any clue how many users there are, but most people would agree that there is at least one user per host."

Internet Domain Survey. The Nua Ltd. and others's quote.

You might want to take a look on some of the illustrations of the above suggestion:

Estimated number of web users in the U.S.: 57,037,000 by Win Treese , May 1998

...the active number of Internet users in the United States is only 37 million, well below the widely reported range of 50 million to 70 million seen in most published reports.
Bits & Bytes, by Michael Bush , July, 1998.

... about 15 million of the total 23 million U.S. households on the Internet receive their online service through AOL.
AOL Eyes Half Of All New Online Users, September, 1998

So, according to " Irresponsible Internet Statistics...",
... there is no absolute way to measure any statistic regarding the growth of the Internet. As John Quarterman of MIDS says:

The Internet is distributed by nature. This is its strongest feature, since no single entity is in control, and its pieces run themselves, cooperating to form the network of networks that is the Internet. However, because no single entity is control, nobody knows everything about the Internet. Measuring it is especially hard because some parts choose to limit access to themselves to various degrees. So, instead of measurement, we have various forms of surveying and estimation.

So all the statistics presented here are based on estimates and conjecture. And even if they were absolutely true, growth rates change. I (Robert Orenstein) read somewhere (if you know where I saw this, please tell me) that there is only one conclusion that can possibly be drawn from such vague data:

The Internet is getting big,
and it's happening fast.

"The Internet is getting big, ...".
Do we still believe that the bigger is better?

Percentage of U.S. public schools connected to the Internet

1994 35

1996 65

Data source: Win Trees

"In a poll taken early last year (1996 -ed.) U.S. teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more "essential" than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare.

... The Kittridge Street Elementary School, in Los Angeles, killed its music program last year to hire a technology coordinator; ... Mansfield, Massachusetts, administrators dropped proposed teaching positions in art, music, and physical education, and then spent $333,000 on computers; in one Virginia school the art room was turned into a computer laboratory. (Ironically, a half dozen preliminary studies recently suggested that music and art classes may build the physical size of a child's brain, and its powers for subjects such as language, math, science, and engineering -- in one case far more than computer work did.) ...

The Computer Delusion , by Todd Oppenheimer,
The Atlantic Monthly; July 1997

The Index:
Prehistory of the Internet

Internet Before World Wide Web

World Wide Web as a Side Effect of Particle Physics Experiments.

Next Crossroad of World Wide Web History

Birth of the World Wide Web

Early History of Hypertext

"Living History" of Hypertext.

Xanadu Plan

Growth of the Internet: Statistics

Conclusion

Suggestions, thoughts, questions? Contact us...

______________________________________________________________________________

Who ...	... and when	...coined the phrases:	What else was done:
Ted Nelson	1965	Hypertext	Hypertext basic concepts
Al Gore	1981	"information superhighway"	Global Information Infrastructure
Tim Berners-Lee	1990	WorldWideWeb	WWW proposal, basic concepts, protocol s, prototype versions
Bob Metcalfe	1995	"Web might be better than sex"	Ethernet, 3Com

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