Surf's Up: 1Billion Online Users Worldwide

For the first time in history, the total worldwide Internet audience surpassed 1 billion visitors in December 2008, according to new data.

Research firm comScore tallied scores based on a global Internet user age of 15 and older using the Web from home and work computers.

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 percent, followed by Europe with 28 percent; North America with 18 percent; Latin-America with 7 percent; and the Middle East and Africa with 5 percent.

"Surpassing 1 billion global users is a significant landmark in the history of the Internet," said Magid Abraham, president and CEO, comScore, in a statement. "It is a monument to the increasingly unified global community in which we live and reminds us that the world truly is becoming more flat."

The comScore research also found that the most popular online sites in the world in December were Google with 777.9 million visitors; Microsoft with 647.9 million visitors)and Yahoo with 562.6 million visitors.

Facebook.com has grown a whopping 127-percent in the past year to 222 million visitors and now ranks as the top social networking site worldwide and the seventh most popular property in the world.

Breaking down the results further, China represented the largest online audience in the world in December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. The U.S. came in with 16.2 percent of global users. followed by Japan with 6 percent, Germany with 3.7 percent and the U.K. with 3.6 percent.

The bottom three countries in Internet users were Spain with 1.8 percent; and Mexico and the Netherlands, with 1.2 percent each.