Spam, social media dominated the web in 2010

In 2010, 1.88 billion email users worldwide sent 107 trillion emails - 89.1 percent of which were spam.

By June 2010, there were 1.97 billion internet users globally, a 14 percent increase from the previous year.

Asia had the biggest web population in June 2010 with 825.1 million internet users.

Europe was second with just over half as many users (475.1 million). North America (266.2 million users), Latin America / Caribbean (204.7 million users), Africa (110.9 million users) and the Middle East (63.2 million users) and Oceania / Australia (21.3 million internet) followed behind.

Social media formed a big part of our collective internet usage in 2010.

Facebook was by far the largest social network around the world in 2010. By the end of the year, 600 million people were sharing information about their every-day lives and status updates with their Facebook friends.  

Each month Facebook users collectively shared 30 billion pieces of content such as photos, videos, links and notes.

Facebook users, 70 percent of which are located outside the US, also spent a tremendous amount of their time playing games and answering quizzes thanks to the large availability of Facebook apps. Each day, there were 20 million Facebook applications installed.  

Facebook users watched more than two billion videos per month (while people on video sharing site YouTube watched around two billion videos per DAY) and uploaded 20 million videos per month (YouTube users uploaded 35 hours of video every minute).

During the year the 175 million people registered with microblogging site Twitter sent more than 25 billion tweets.

Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) was Twitter's most followed user, racking up a hefty 7.7 million followers.

Additional facts about the internet in 2010:

• 255 million - The number of websites as of December 2010
• 88.8 million - .COM domain names at the end of 2010
• 250 million - New people on Facebook in 2010
• 186 - The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA)
• 5 billion - Photos hosted by photo sharing website Flickr (September 2010)
• 3+ billion - Photos uploaded per month to Facebook

Web monitoring company Pingdom scoured the web and crunched their own numbers to come up with this unique snapshot of the web in 2010. The full list of source references can be found in Pingdom's January 12 blog post: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/.