The Internet is growing at an annual rate of 18% and currently has one billion users. It will add another billion users over the next 10 years, resulting in colossal changes to usability.
In 2005, we quietly passed a milestone in the history of the Internet: the number of users reached one billion. Since the Internet does not have a single register of users, we cannot say for certain who the lucky billionth user was and when he or she became one. Statistically, it was probably a 24-year-old woman from Shanghai.
According to Morgan Stanley estimates, 36% of Internet users currently reside in Asia and 24% in Europe. Only 23% of users live in North America – the place where everything began in 1969 with two networked PCs, one of them in Los Angeles and the other in Palo-Alto.
The Internet took 36 years to reach the first billion. It will most likely add the second billion already by 2015. Most of the users in the second billion will be located in Asia. The third billion is prove harder to accomplish. This number will be achieved only by 2040.
E-commerce will continue to grow. It normally takes a person two to three years to become confident enough to start shopping online. This means that sales of commercial websites will at least double from the current level as the current billion users start shopping on the web.
A billion of Internet users is quite a motley crowd that differs considerably from residents of Silicon Valley and other technology centers. For example, the Internet has several hundred million elderly users, and even more users without a higher education. Today’s users are completely unlike you, and this difference between the elite and rank-and-file users of the Internet is becoming increasingly pronounced.