More Than Half The World's Population Is Now Online, And Internet Services Are Booming

It's been a few decades since the dawn of the Internet, but we've finally passed a major milestone.

According to a recent report on internet trends by venture capitalist Mary Meeker, more than half the world's population is now online.

Images courtesy: Reuters

The number of people connected to the Internet last year grew by 6 percent to 3.8 billion, or 51 percent of the world's total population.

However, though that number has been growing year on year, that growth has considerably slowed down over the years. In 2017, there were 3.6 billion people online, or 49 percent of the population.

Meeker spent eight years at the venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins before branching out on her own last year. Since her stint as an analyst at Morgan Stanley in 1995, she's published an exhaustive report on the state of the Internet each year.

In her very first report, she estimated only about 10 million were connected to the Internet, of the 150 million that owned personal computers. Nearly 25 years later, that online growth has significantly slowed down, even as tech companies struggle to bring more people (and therefore more customers) online.

To that end, cheaper smartphones have given a boost to the online community growth rate, but their sales dropped 4 percent in 2018 after a year of stagnation.

But with the addition of more people online, Internet services have also experienced a bit of an upswing. E-commerce sales rose 12.4 percent in the first quarter of this year to hit 15 of total retail sales across the globe. However, it was still down from the between 15 to 20 percent market share of previous years.

Internet ad revenue meanwhile slowed to 20 percent growth at the beginning of this year, down from 37 percent growth last year. Most of that belongs to giants like Google and Facebook, though the likes of Amazon and Twitter aren't far behind.