There is no web push census

I wanted a map

I wanted a simple map. Sweden. Korea. The United States. How many people have actually said yes to a website notification.

I did not find a census. I found vendor posts that treat opt-in rates as if they were population statistics. I found market-size PDFs that count software spend. None of that is a count of people.

Three different things

What does exist is three layers that get mashed together.

Internet users. DataReportal's Digital 2026 mid-year update, with Manochi's analysis, puts global internet users at 6.12 billion at the start of April 2026, 73.8 percent of the world. Close to 2.2 billion people were still offline. That is who is on the internet. It is not who allowed a site to ping the browser. Source: DataReportal, Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update.

The country pages in the same series use late-2025 data. Sweden: 10.5 million internet users, 98.3 percent. Norway 5.58 million, 99.0 percent. Denmark 5.95 million, 99.0 percent. The United Kingdom 68.1 million, 97.8 percent. South Korea 50.6 million, 97.9 percent. Germany 78.5 million, 93.5 percent. The United States 324 million, 93.1 percent. Source: DataReportal Digital 2026 country reports, data as of October 2025.

Then there are sites. The 2025 Web Almanac crawled in July 2025. About one fifth of sites use a service worker. Among PWAs, push and notificationclick sit around 7 percent. Push as an advanced capability shows up on 1.7 percent of desktop PWAs and 1.6 percent of mobile PWAs. Desktop users ignore notification prompts 78 percent of the time. Mobile acceptance is 16 percent. Source: HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025, PWA chapter, published 16 January 2026.

In WMTips' August 2026 website sample, push-notification platforms were detected on 0.6 percent of analysed Korean websites, compared with 1.8 percent in Sweden and 4.3 percent in Denmark. The global sample in that snapshot was 3.0 percent. Detection can miss custom implementations. It may include more than standards-based web push. The samples are not all publishers. Source: WMTips, 7 August 2026.

Those are sites, not people.

The list would rot anyway

Even if someone published a subscriber percentage by country tomorrow, Chrome is already taking permission back. Chrome automatically removes notification permission for sites a person has not interacted with recently when engagement is very low and notification volume is high. Chrome tells the person. Installed web apps are not included. Source: Google, 10 October 2025.

In the same post Google says less than 1 percent of all notifications receive any interaction. Source: Google, 10 October 2025.

A map of who is subscribed would be out of date in the same week you drew it.

What I will not do

I will not turn a detection sample into a sentence about Korean publishers. I will not invent an opt-in rate for Sweden. I will not sell a global percentage that a tool vendor put in a blog.

We will crawl a curated publisher set later and publish the method first. This piece is not that report. It is the reason the report has to be careful.

If you want the browser half of the same problem, I wrote that next.