Digital snapshot: Internet and social media use in 2017

We Are Social and Hootsuite recently published the Digital in 2017 Global Overview report, which reveals that more than half of the world’s population now uses the internet.

Our findings have exciting implications for businesses, governments, and society in general, but they’re also a testament to the speed with which digital connectivity is changing the lives of people all over the world.

It’s only been 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web available to the public, but in that time, the internet has already become an integral part of everyday life for most of the world’s population.

It’s not just the internet that’s growing rapidly, either; we’ve identified a wealth of other important milestones as part of this year’s Global Digital report:

• More than half the world now uses a smartphone
• Almost two-thirds of the world’s population now has a mobile phone
• More than half of the world’s web traffic now comes from mobile phones
• More than half of all mobile connections around the world are now “broadband”
• More than one in five of the world’s population shopped online in the past 30 days

You’ll find more valuable information in the full suite of Global Digital reports. I’ve shared a sneak preview in the SlideShare embed at the top of this post, but you can find more data in this compilation.

The rest of this post is designed to take you beyond the numbers, though, offering insights into key trends, as well as what the numbers mean for you and your business or organization in 2017. A big thanks to the organizations who provided the data to make this year’s report possible:

• GlobalWebIndex
• GSMA Intelligence
• Statista
• Akamai
• Google
• StatCounter
• Ericsson
• Niki Aghaei

So, what did all their data tell us?

Global overview

The digital world experienced spectacular growth in 2016, with the pace of change accelerating across almost all key indicators versus 2015.

Here are the headline numbers:

• 3.77 billion global internet users in 2017, equaling 50 percent penetration
• 2.80 billion global social media users in 2017, equaling 37 percent penetration
• 4.92 billion global mobile users in 2017, equaling 66 percent penetration
• 2.56 billion global mobile social media users in 2017, equaling 34 percent penetration
• 1.61 billion global ecommerce users in 2017, equaling 22 percent penetration

Internet use

Social media use