From 2002 to 2012, we have gone from 569 million internet users to a staggering 2.27 billion! Compare that to seven billion of the total population on the planet, and you'll begin to appreciate the steep increase in websites and web users. Within the last ten years, the average user has gone from using the web for 46 minutes a day to 4 hours a day! You can take a look at this wonderful animated inforgaphic called "A Decade Later".

The World Wide Web boasts of 555 million hosted sites, including commercial sites, blogs, portals, social networks, e-commerce, consulting etc. You can take a look at this graph of Amazon.com showing a steady increase in growth over the years:

The world is going on-line and here are five more statistics for you to digest:

1. Web Domain Trade is a Profitable Business:

A Canadian entrepreneur, Kevin Ham, has seen the potential of the industry and is currently earning by trading web domains. Kevin owns around 100,000 domains worth a pot of gold which in turn generate an ad revenue of $70 million per year!

2. Blogs are Booming... Literally:

The founder of Blogger.com, Evan Williams, may not have known that what he was starting was going to become the phenomenon it is today. He's heading Twitter these days (which has re-shaped the idea of real-time information and has become a billion dollar entity) while the blogosphere crosses the one million posts mark every single day. This means that every year, the blog space doubles twice its size!

3. The Fail Whale No More:

Twitter is handling approximately 58 million tweets every 24 hours seamlessly. From the birth of the royal baby that was first broken via the platform, to updates on Olympic scores, to political movements, to marketing campaigns – Twitter has supported upwards of 300 billion tweets so far. In 2013, Twitter earned revenue of $400 million from advertising.

4. Google is a Verb for a Reason:

Every day, Google works its brain on nearly 6 billion searches of which 15% have never been worked on before. It is also interesting to note that 56% of Internet users go to Google to search themselves and because we have given Google so much information, it is creepy to note how much it knows about us!

5. Change is the Only Constant:

Alexa.com lists the top 500 websites in the world, as well as by country. Internet is one of the industries where a new company can get in the top ten list as easily as Pinterest is now #28 globally even though it was founded just two years ago! We'll continue to see changes in the top ten websites in the world as start-ups backed by great ideas give giants like Google and Facebook tough competition. No wonder Facebook is quickly acquiring new ventures like Instagram and Watsapp to stay on top!

The Web & Dubai:

In the Middle East, UAE is number 2 in terms of Internet penetration with 71% of its population using online access every day. Of the total digital advertising spend in the world, 10% comes from MENA states.  In 2013 alone, the Middle East spent $5 billion on online advertising. Dubai, specially, has been getting a lot of attention which is reflecting on its online traffic. Finance, real estate, automotive and telecom industries are specially investing heavily in web development and advertising in Dubai.

Catering to nearly 500 million internet users, these companies rely on digital campaigns directly involving customers and relying on their fans' participations. This seems a sensible strategy since 4 out of 10 fans would buy their goods online.

So there you have it: eye-opening statistics about the web and Dubai's ever-growing internet usage. This is just a glimpse of why this is such an exciting industry and what lure it holds for new entrepreneurs in the UAE. You can be sure that one year down the road, these numbers will be left far behind as the Internet explodes and the world comes closer together.