If you're over the age of 40, you probably remember a time when there wasn't an Internet. Email didn't exist, and many people didn't have video cameras let alone smartphones and the ability to upload and share videos with the world within seconds. Fast forward to January 2013, and it's hard to imagine how we'd live without the Internet.Royal Pingdom gathered a long list of statistics related to the size and influence of the Internet throughout 2012, and some of the numbers are truly amazing. Let's take a look at some 2012 Internet highlights:

1. 2.4 billion = Number Internet users worldwide (1.1 billion of them are in Asia)
2. 78.6% = Internet penetration in North America
3. 1.2 trillion = Number of searches on Google
4. 634 million = Number of websites
5. 191 million = Number of visitors to Google (the #1 web property)
6. 59.4 million = Number of WordPress sites around the world
7. 87.8 million = Number of Tumblr blogs
8. 1 billion = Number of monthly active users on Facebook (passed in October)
9. 2.7 billion = Number of "likes" on Facebook every day
10. 200 million = Number of active users on Twitter (passed in December)
11. 175 million = Average number of tweets published every day
12. 187 million = Number of members on LinkedIn (passed in September)
13. 5 billion = Number of times per day the +1 button is used each day on Google+
14. 150 million = Number of unique visitors for video to Google Sites (the #1 video property, includes YouTube)
15. 1 billion = Number of views of PSY's Gangnam Style making it the first video to reach 1 billion views (reached within 5 months)
16. 4 billion = Number of hours of video watched on YouTube per month
17. 60 million = Number of global viewers monthly on Ustream
18. 7 petabytes = How much photo content Facebook added every month
19. 300 million = Number of new photos added to Facebook every day
20. 1.1 billion = Number of global smartphone users
21. 6.7 billion = Number of mobile subscriptions
22. 5 billion = Number of mobile phone users
23. 2.2 billion = Number of email users worldwide
24. 425 million = Number of active Gmail users globally (the leading email provider worldwide)
25. 68.8% = Percentage of email traffic that was spam

You can view all of the statistics about the Internet in 2012 on the Royal Pingdom site (follow the link above). There is a huge amount of amazing statistics offered, and many are sure to wow you.To give you some more interesting data, check out the social media statistics published by Rani Molla of GigaOM yesterday, which show the number of monthly active users for the most popular social sites:

• Facebook = 1 billion
• Tumblr = 400 million
• Twitter = 200 million
• LinkedIn = 160 billion
• Google+ = 135 million
• Instagram = 90 million
• Pinterest = 25 million visitors (per comScore)
• Foursquare = 8 million

You can get the details at GigaOM, which also includes when each social site debuted enabling you to grasp just how quickly some of these sites have grown.Makes you wonder how these numbers will look in January 2014. What do you think?Image: cjluc