Five years ago, there were less than a hundred million people using the internet. Today, we have over 1.2 billion users sending traffic to the virtual world on daily basis.  And as a medium for all sorts of communication, you’d be amazed at the true sharing behavior of web users.

Here’s an interesting infographic called “Five Years of Sharing” from AddThis, the world’s largest content sharing platform.  To celebrate its fifth anniversary, the AddThis infographic outlines the sharing behavior of internet users over the last 5 years.

Where do we share?

The dotcom era is so far dominated by the US and no other country is quite like it, subsequently making 9:30 am EST the day’s peak hour for sharing. Users are also rather fond of copy-pasting URLs when they share content than using a sharing tool.  Twitter’s got the largest surge of content shared over the last five years, outdoing Facebook Likes and LinkedIn.

It’s interesting to note that if each page view generated just a second of human attention, there’d be 90 years worth of attention generated daily. The internet also processes more data in a week than the Hubble Telescope in its first 20 years. Over the last 5 years, there’s an estimated 1.78 trillion page views generated, and if we are to go back in time by 1.78 trillion seconds, we will see the genesis of humanity.

AddThis releases an analysis of sharing behavior every year and here’s what they had for 2010. Their social sharing capabilities have also recently gone mobile to cater iOS and Android devices, and they’re turning AddThis Analytics into an audience platform as part of their growing monetization scheme. Clearspring, the company that runs AddThis, recently hired former Yahoo executive Ramsey McGrory to become the company’s new CEO.