In 2012, roughly 2.4 billion people worldwide used the Web, recording some 2.7 billion Facebook likes and 175 million tweets per day, according to a report by Pingdom, which compiled a year of data on the Internet, email, and social media.

Some key worldwide findings for 2012:

• 144 billion emails were sent per day during the year, of which 68.8% were spam.
• 43% of the top 1 million websites were hosted in the US.
• 48% of the top 100 blogs were published via WordPress.
• The market share of GoDaddy.com, the biggest domain name registrar in the world was 32.4%.
• 4 billion hours of video was viewed via YouTube each month.
• 7 PBs (petabytes, or 10 to the 15th power) of photo content was added to Facebook every month.

Below, additional finding form Pingdom's report, based on data from a wide range of sources, including Internet World Stats, StatCounter, Verisign, Facebook, and Twitter. 

As of June 30, 2012, Asia accounted for the plurality (44.8%) of the world's Internet population; Europe followed with 21.6% and North America with 11.4%: 

The populations of Internet users across the world (amounting to 2.4 billion users) were as follows:

• Asia: 1.1 billion Internet users
• Europe: 519 million
• North America: 274 million
• Latin America / Caribbean: 255 million
• Africa: 167 million
• Middle East: 90 million
• Oceania/Australia: 24.3 million

China had 565 million Internet users—more than any other country in the world. China's Internet penetration (among its total population) was roughly 42% in mid-2012.

World Internet Penetration

The penetration of Internet users among a population tells a slightly different story than user counts.

North America had the highest Internet penetration as of June, at 78.6%, followed by Oceana/Australia (67.6%) and Europe (63.2%). 

Domain Names

Below, are stats on Web domains as of December 2012, from Verisign:

• Number of domain name registrations across all top-level domains: 246 million
• Number of country code top-level domain name registrations: 104.9 million
• Number of .com domain names: 100 million
• Number of .net domain names: 14.1 million
• Number of .org domain names: 9.7 million
• Number of .info domain names: 6.7 million
• Number of .biz domain names: 2.2 million

Websites

The report also compiled website stats from various data providers:

• Total number of  websites as of December: 634 million
• Number of websites added in 2012: 52 million
• Share of the top 1 million  websites hosted in the US: 43%
• Share of the top 100 blogs powered by WordPress: 48%
• Share of the top 10,000 websites served by open source software: 75%
• Total number of Tumblr blogs: 87.8 million
• Total number of Wordpress blogs: 60.7 million

Email

Email findings for the full year of 2012 were provided by the Radicati Group, a tech market research firm:

• Number of email users worldwide: 2.2 billion
• Total email traffic per day worldwide: 144 billion messages
• Number of email clients worldwide: 4.3 billion

Other email stats, from various sources:

• Number of active Gmail users globally, making it the leading email provider worldwide: 425 million.
• Usage share of iOS, the most popular email client: 35.6%

Social Media

The report also compiled user stats and engagement metrics for Facebook and Twitter in 2012, from various sources.

Facebook stats:

• Number of monthly posts by Facebook Pages in Brazil, making it the most active country on Facebook: 85,962
• Number of monthly active users on Facebook, surpassed in October: 1 billion
• Percentage of Facebook users who are woman: 47%
• Average age of a Facebook user: 40.5
• Number of likes posted on Facebook every day: 2.7 billion
• Share of the top 10,000 websites integrated with Facebook: 24.3%

Twitter stats:

• Monthly active users on Twitter, surpassed in December: 200 million
• Average number of tweets sent every day during 2012: 175 million
• Average age of a Twitter user: 37.3
• Average number of total tweets per user: 307
• Average number of followers per Twitter user: 51
• Number of heads of state with a Twtter account: 123
• Number of retweets of Barack Obama's tweet:"Four more years," the most retweets ever: 819,000+
• Number of tweets during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics: 9.66 million

Other social media stats:

• Number of members on LinkedIn (as of September): 187 million
• Average age of a LinkedIn user: 44.2
• Number of monthly active users on Google+: 135 million
• How many times per day the +1 button on Google+ is used: 5 billion

Read the full post for other data on Web browsers, search, mobile technology, video, and image content.