Content distribution is shaped by more than publishing volume. Device mix, network capacity, search discovery, APIs, DNS queries, connection reliability, and security controls all influence how digital media reaches audiences. The figures below combine Cloudflare measurements from 2024 with Cisco forecasts made for 2023; the forecast figures are presented as forecasts, not current measurements.
Contents
- Traffic and device mix
- Connected devices and video readiness
- Connectivity, speed, and access
- Discovery, APIs, and automated traffic
- DNS and regional distribution
- Reliability and delivery security
Traffic and device mix
Cloudflare reported that global internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024. That expansion was divided unevenly between access devices: mobile devices accounted for 41.3% of global traffic, while desktop devices accounted for 58.7%. For publishers and streaming services, this split makes responsive presentation and device-aware delivery important parts of distribution planning. (Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review)
The global averages conceal substantial geographic variation. Sudan, Cuba, and Syria each recorded more than 77% of traffic from mobile devices in 2024. Nearly 100 countries and regions had a majority of traffic from mobile devices. A distribution strategy that treats the desktop share as representative everywhere can therefore understate the importance of mobile delivery in many markets. (Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review)
Cloudflare’s 2024 measurements also show variation within mobile ecosystems. Peak Android traffic share exceeded 95%, while peak iOS traffic share reached around 66%. These are peak shares rather than universal global averages, so they describe the upper points observed in the year rather than a single all-market platform split. (Cloudflare Radar 2024 Year in Review)
Protocol and application layers add another dimension. HTTP/3 was one of the major HTTP versions tracked in global client traffic during 2024. More than half of the dynamic traffic Cloudflare observed was API related, indicating that distribution increasingly includes machine-to-machine exchanges alongside pages, images, audio, and video. (Cloudflare Radar 2024 Year in Review)
Connected devices and video readiness
Cisco’s Annual Internet Report 2018–2023 projected 5.3 billion global internet users by 2023, equal to 66% of the global population. The same forecast put global connected devices and connections at 29.3 billion by 2023, compared with 18.4 billion in 2018. That implied a rise from 2.4 to 3.6 networked devices per capita.
The forecast also described a major change in the composition of connected endpoints. Machine-to-machine connections were projected to grow from 6.1 billion in 2018 to 14.7 billion in 2023, reaching 50% of total devices and connections, up from 33% in 2018. Consumer devices and connections were projected to represent 74% of the total in 2023, with business devices accounting for the remaining 26%.
| Cisco forecast for 2023 | Projected figure |
|---|---|
| Global internet users | 5.3 billion |
| Networked devices and connections | 29.3 billion |
| Devices and connections per capita | 3.6 |
| M2M connections | 14.7 billion |
| M2M share of total connections | 50% |
| Video-capable devices and connections | 47% |
Connected-home applications were projected to represent 48% of all M2M connections by 2023. Connected-car applications were projected to grow at a 30% compound annual growth rate through 2023. These forecasts point to a distribution environment in which content can be requested by household systems, vehicles, and other connected endpoints, not only by conventional computers and phones. (Cisco Annual Internet Report 2018–2023)
Video was a central part of Cisco’s device outlook. Nearly half of all devices and connections, 47%, were projected to be video capable by 2023. Cisco projected connected TVs would reach 3.2 billion units. Smartphones were projected to reach 6.7 billion units in 2023, up from 4.9 billion in 2018. PCs were projected to decline at a 2.3% rate over the forecast period but still total 1.2 billion, compared with 840 million tablets.
Cisco also projected that 66% of connected flat-panel TV sets would be 4K by 2023, up from 33% in 2018. Its estimate put 4K video at about 15–18 Mbps, more than double the HD bit rate and nine times the SD bit rate. For content distributors, that makes format selection and adaptive delivery directly relevant to network demand. (Cisco Annual Internet Report 2018–2023)
Connectivity, speed, and access
Cisco forecast that 5G connections would represent 10.6% of total mobile connections by 2023. Low-power wide-area network connections were projected to reach 14.4% of total mobile connections, up from 2.5% in 2018. These figures describe different connectivity uses, but together they show how mobile distribution was expected to expand beyond conventional smartphone access.
Public access points were also expected to grow. Cisco projected global public Wi-Fi hotspots would increase four-fold, from 169 million in 2018 to nearly 628 million in 2023. Wi-Fi 6 hotspots were projected to grow 13-fold and reach 11% of all public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2023.
The same report projected substantial speed increases. Average global mobile connection speed was forecast to rise from 13 Mbps in 2018 to 44 Mbps in 2023. Average global Wi-Fi connection speed was projected to increase from 30 Mbps to 92 Mbps, while average global fixed broadband speed was projected to rise from 46 Mbps to 110 Mbps. Cisco also projected nearly 70% of the global population, or 5.7 billion people, would have mobile connectivity by 2023. (Cisco Annual Internet Report 2018–2023)
Country-level forecasts showed how uneven access capacity could be. Cisco projected 13.6 devices and connections per capita in the United States by 2023, compared with 12.1 in South Korea and 11.1 in Japan. These are device-density forecasts, not audience-size measures, but they help explain why a single delivery assumption may behave differently across markets.
Discovery, APIs, and automated traffic
Search remains a major route into distributed content. Google referred more than 88% of global search traffic to Cloudflare customers in 2024. For media publishers, that figure describes referral concentration: search discovery was not evenly distributed among search providers in the Cloudflare customer population. (Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review)
Automated traffic was also geographically and operationally concentrated. The United States generated more than one-third of global bot traffic in 2024. Amazon Web Services generated 12.7% of global bot traffic, and Google generated 7.8%. These figures identify traffic sources and infrastructure associated with bots; they do not establish that all automated traffic was malicious or that all bot activity represented content consumption. (Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review)
The API layer was a large part of dynamic distribution. More than half of the dynamic traffic seen by Cloudflare was API related in 2024. Go-based clients made approximately 12% of automated API requests. This matters for streaming catalogs, publishing systems, personalization, syndication, and other workflows in which data is assembled or delivered through requests rather than a single static page. (Cloudflare Radar 2024 Year in Review)
DNS and regional distribution
Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver saw an average of 1.8 trillion queries per day in 2024 through October 6, according to the Cloudflare Impact Report 2024. DNS queries are not equivalent to page views, streams, or unique people, but their scale illustrates the volume of lookup activity supporting internet distribution.
The report’s regional breakdown provides a view of where those resolver queries originated. North America accounted for 30.8% of queries during the report period, Europe for 24.7%, Asia for 15.9%, and Latin America for 11.4%.
| Region | Share of 1.1.1.1 queries |
|---|---|
| North America | 30.8% |
| Europe | 24.7% |
| Asia | 15.9% |
| Latin America | 11.4% |
These regional shares should be read as shares of Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 resolver queries during the stated 2024 Impact Report period, not as a global ranking of all internet requests or all content audiences. (Cloudflare Impact Report 2024)
Reliability and delivery security
Distribution depends on traffic arriving intact and on infrastructure remaining available. Cloudflare reported that 20.7% of TCP connections were unexpectedly terminated before any useful data could be exchanged in 2024. The figure covers connection outcomes observed by Cloudflare and does not mean that 20.7% of all content requests globally failed. (Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review)
Cloudflare also reported that 6.5% of global traffic was mitigated in 2024. The corresponding figures were 5.1% of traffic in the United States and 8.1% in South Korea. Forty-four countries and regions had more than 10% of traffic mitigated. Mitigation can include security controls applied to suspicious or unwanted traffic, so these figures describe handled traffic rather than ordinary audience demand. (Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review)
DDoS activity illustrates the operational scale behind content availability. Cloudflare’s Q1 2024 report recorded 4.5 million mitigated DDoS attacks, 10.5 trillion mitigated HTTP DDoS requests, and more than 59 petabytes of mitigated network-layer attack traffic. The largest Q1 attack reached 2 Tbps. Four out of every 100 HTTP DDoS attacks were launched by a Mirai-variant botnet, as were two out of every 100 Layer 3/Layer 4 attacks. (Cloudflare DDoS Attack Trends for 2024 Q1)
In Q2, Cloudflare mitigated 4 million DDoS attacks, 10.2 trillion HTTP DDoS requests, and 57 petabytes of network-layer DDoS traffic. The quarter’s attacks split into 2.2 million network-layer attacks and 1.8 million HTTP attacks. Cloudflare’s systems generated about 19 million fingerprints to counter randomized HTTP DDoS attacks. Across the first half of 2024, it reported 8.5 million mitigated DDoS attacks. (Cloudflare DDoS threat report for 2024 Q2)
The second half brought larger reported peaks. Cloudflare mitigated nearly 6 million DDoS attacks in Q3, including more than 200 hyper-volumetric network-layer attacks exceeding 1 Tbps or 1 billion packets per second. The largest Q3 attacks peaked at 3.8 Tbps and 2.2 billion packets per second, and Cloudflare detected and mitigated a 4.2 Tbps attack on October 21, 2024. (Cloudflare DDoS threat report for 2024 Q3)
For the full year, Cloudflare reported 21.3 million mitigated DDoS attacks and an average of 4,870 blocked DDoS attacks every hour. Q4 alone accounted for 6.9 million attacks, split 49% Layer 3/Layer 4 and 51% HTTP. Q4 attack volume rose 16% quarter over quarter and 83% year over year. More than 420 hyper-volumetric attacks exceeded 1 billion packets per second and 1 Tbps, while attacks exceeding 1 Tbps grew 1,885% quarter over quarter. The largest DDoS attack Cloudflare had reported peaked at 5.6 Tbps during Halloween week 2024. (Cloudflare DDoS threat report for 2024 Q4)
Network scale expanded alongside the threat environment. Cloudflare reported that its global network capacity grew 817%, from 35 Tbps to 321 Tbps, by the end of 2024. Its presence expanded 65%, from 200 cities in early 2020 to 330 cities by the end of 2024. By year-end, Cloudflare said it served and protected nearly 20% of all websites and close to 18,000 unique customer IP networks. (Cloudflare DDoS threat report for 2024 Q4)