As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally.
Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.
I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics. I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.
The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).
Let’s break them down by section:
Google search stats:
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index (source)
2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily (source)
$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (source)
24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)
68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year (source: keyword tool)
$39.96 - the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source: keyword tool)
1,430,000 - the number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”
136,000 - the number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”
Wikipedia stats
2,695,205 - the number of articles in English on Wikipedia
684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year
75,000 - the number of active contributors to Wikipedia
10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages
260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia
(source)
YouTube stats
70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube (March 2008)
200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)
100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)
112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)
2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video
412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)
26.57 - average age of uploader
13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006
$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day
Blogosphere stats
133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)
900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period
1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)
77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs
55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)
81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere
59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years
Twitter stats
1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)
3,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2008) (from TechCrunch)
165,414 - number of followers of the most popular Twitter user (@BarackObama) – but he’s not active
86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)
63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)
Facebook stats
200,000,000 – number of active users
100,000,000 - number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day
170 - number of countries/territories that use Facebook
35 - number of different languages used on Facebook
2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily
100 – number of friends the average user has
700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly
52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook
140 - number of new applications added per day
Digg stats
236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)
56% - percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users
124,340 - number of stories MrBabyMan, the number one user, has Dugg (see updated number here)
612 - number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg (see all 41 pages of them here)
36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received (see story here)
Related posts from The Future Buzz
22 Smart, Inspirational Quotes From Bloggers In 2008
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50 Stunning Images From Flickr Under Creative Commons
Related posts from around the web
Social Media Trends 2009, TrendsSpotting (Read Write Web)
The Face of Facebook Global Report – Q4 2008 (Techno//Marketer)
56 Internet Goals To Get You Inspired for a Great 2009 (Daily Blog Tips)
117 comments so far
Adam,
Just discovered your blog, and I have to say that it’s one of the best in the PR/marketing/social media space that I’ve seen yet. Great topics and content.
Looking forward to reading more.
Paul
January 12th, 2009This is extremely useful information – especially when your job is to communicate the benefits of social media to small businesses. Thanks!
January 12th, 2009Great stats! Thanks so much for the time you took to gather all these stats in one, easy to view place. I’ll be using your material to back up a number of arguments I make in corporate marketing. Thanks again!
January 12th, 2009These stats are mind-boggling! Whoa… And to think its exponential. Today, this. Tomorrow?
January 12th, 2009and, bookmarked – I love stats. Great resource that I will probably cite a lot in my blog posts – thanks for compiling all these.
January 12th, 2009Awesome stats! Thanks.
January 12th, 2009Wow. that’s all very interesting
January 12th, 2009Nice job, Adam. Will visit again.
January 12th, 2009Thanks for sharing stats on the social media sites. Very resoureful information.
January 12th, 2009These are some serious stats. Never had any idea what the numbers were. This put things into perspective for marketing my blog. Thank you for the hard work in creating this and research of course.
January 12th, 2009Wow, those are mind blowing figures. I never thought about Google losing money with the I’m Feeling Lucky button.
Good post
January 12th, 2009You say that http://twitter.com/kevinrose is the most active Twitter user. He may be the most followed, but http://twitter.com/jowyang is far more “active” with over 12,300 tweets.
January 12th, 2009awesome statistics share.
January 12th, 2009more sources for stats would be +awesome.
where did you get these numbers and how often do you update them?
January 12th, 2009great stuff btw.
thanks
Amazing stats! Very helpful when your job centers on internet statistics. Thanks for all the great work.
Michelle
January 13th, 2009Cool Stats, cool blog. Thanks!
January 13th, 2009Nice work, Adam. Would love to see Google’s stats vs. Yahoo! search and vs. Live search. Thanks for the info.
January 13th, 2009This must have took a bit of work to compile. Nice job. Very useful!
January 13th, 2009Makes you think how small you are, particularly when starting up a new blog!
January 13th, 2009Great article, Adam! Mind blowing stats! Did/Will you do any research on Flickr?
January 13th, 2009Cheers,
Mark
@Mark – no, but that’s another good thought, it is worth digging – I’ll see if I can add some to my next Flickr roundup for you.
@Everyone else – thanks for your comments, glad you enjoyed this.
January 13th, 2009That is quite an amazing list!!
January 13th, 2009Awesome stats. Thank you for sharing.
January 13th, 2009Outstanding compilation. Will be very helpful in presentations across gov’t to help convince folks why we need to be out there.
There’s still a place for gov’t to have its own sites, but we also need to be where the people are.
Jeffrey Levy
January 13th, 2009Director of Web Communications
US EPA
These stats really opened my eyes regarding certain platforms like Digg. A comparison between 2008 and 2009 will be great, definitely looking forward to that.
Thanks for putting up some great stats.
Wayne Liew
January 14th, 2009http://www.wayneliew.com
Thanks for sharing nice information.
January 14th, 2009Amazing collection. Thanks for pulling this together.
January 15th, 2009Hi There,
Great blog and coming from a statistics background, your impressive stats are a great read. No one can deny the explosive growth of Social Media and Social Networking
January 15th, 2009Adam, Great job on these stats! Thank you for doing the research and giving the whole community one more piece of ammo in the arsenal. :)
January 15th, 2009There’s nothing like a good stat and you’ve certainly aggregated a number of good stats. Thanks for sharing them here, Adam.
January 15th, 2009Nice post thanks…amazing stats!
January 18th, 2009Really interesting, hope to get soon more stats from other popular services.
January 19th, 2009How can YouTube turn a profit with those costs ??
January 19th, 2009No kidding Russell. That means it costs $365 million dollars a year just for bandwidth. Add to that server costs, power costs, etc how can YouTube ever turn a profit?
January 19th, 2009Awesome stats! Thanks for sharing.
January 19th, 2009Thanks you for this very interesting data ;)
January 21st, 2009Great set of data – useful for presentations…thanks for compiling this cheat sheet
January 22nd, 2009Somehow I doubt that many people actual search Google for the word “Google”. My guess would be that they have Google set as their browser’s “Default Search Engine” and when they type “google” into the address bar without the .com, the browser is automatically Googling “google”.
January 28th, 2009wow. i guess this whole internet thing is a big deal, huh?
January 28th, 2009Very very interesting!
January 30th, 2009Dear Adam,
The Statistics you provide are excellent and informative regarding Web2.0, I am wondering that how much popularity Web2.0 got within a little amount of time.
January 31st, 2009I did not realize that Google was actually losing money on those “I’m Feeling Lucky” clicks
January 31st, 2009@Joe – yes, it bypasses AdWords
January 31st, 2009I have to say this is great stat. Just curious to know how you have collated all this?
February 2nd, 2009These Numbers are Awesome!
February 3rd, 2009@Nihar – spent some time researching – I knew all of this content was out there, I wanted to put it all in one spot.
February 3rd, 2009great stats.
February 4th, 2009on blog readership — depends what you mean by “read blogs”. Forrester found last year that just 25% of the online population in the US read blogs at least monthly. So if your measure is “ever read blogs” then the 77% probably flies, but it’s also a bit misleading.
February 4th, 2009This may help convince the cautious, the critical or the conservative that social media are huge today, and are most likely to stay. These figures also call for some comments. First, what makes this noteworthy is the fact that the sources of the information are provided. This is not always so on the web. Second, a figure that stands alone is at best impressive; it only becomes useful if you are given a basis of comparison, e.g. online versus offline, a web audience vs a newspaper or tv audience, surfers vs buyers, … Let’s be careful : figures are inherently misleading! We only make them meaningful by putting them into perspective.
February 9th, 2009The stats are amazing. When you list them in this fashion, it really wakes one up. Nice article Loved it. Thanks.
February 9th, 2009Just discovered your site from kimwoodbridge.com, and found lots of helpful posts here, it is quite interesting to know figures on this post, short listed our site.
February 19th, 2009Thanks for sharing these amazing stats. I have already bookmarked this page and will use it when I talk to small business clients
February 26th, 2009Just starting out with some blogs and I must say the numbers are just a bit daunting, how many blogs actually get read with any frequency? There is practically one blog for every 2 readers!!
March 8th, 2009@dmar9 – well of course, they are all of varying popularity and purpose. This page will help you make sense of it all (I know it is daunting): http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
March 8th, 2009Nice information :-).
March 12th, 2009What about adding the http://www.stumbleupon.com in the list ?
March 19th, 2009@vyasjam – That’s a thought – I will see what stats I can pull
March 19th, 2009These are great stats … but they’re missing a really important point. The fact is that social media really should be thought of as “a collaborative engagement platform.” While that may seem obvious, or a trivial label, it’s an important distinction. Collaborative engagement platforms have the power to truly transform the way organizations operate. When you can leverage user controlled/contributed content in a collaborative decision-making fashion you enable a productivity boost amongst traditional knowledge workers that is akin to robotic automation of traditional manual labor.
The problem is that operating models in nearly every organization are based on a post-industrial revolution command/control structure and haven’t changed in the last 100 years. Sadly, most efforts aimed at leveraging the great platform components you’ve described here try to do so in these outmoded operating models (imagine a monthly “blog” written by the CEO … that’s precisely missing the point!)
Here’s a link to an approach that a few companies have started to realize is necessary to really get the juice from squeezing the web 2.0 fruit:
http://www.bis-insight.com/Site/The_Future_of_Productivity.html
March 25th, 2009Nice stats – a comparison of how things have changes from 2008 to 2009 would help.
A recent article suggests facebook leads the show while myspace is loosing a bit. Also, do we assume all the reported stats are correct ?
March 31st, 2009http://www.jenesysgroup.com
Impressive numbers. I wonder how Google can recognize all the good pages from bad ones. There are one trillion of them to choose from… lol, their algorithm must be really superb!
April 8th, 2009Adam – Thanks for compiling such a comprehensive list. It was so well done I shared it with my company on our blog site (Picture Perfect San Diego).
April 11th, 2009This list was so helpful! Thanks for putting these together.
You know what’s cool? @kevinrose – the user with the most followers – now has 480,220 followers and it’s only been a few months since you posted this. Twitter is growing like crazy!
April 16th, 2009Wow! Amazing numbers.. Just like the credit crisis, some of these figures are well beyond my imagination.
April 27th, 2009amazing stats, just know from your blog. very useful information. how you get all stats?it’s just so good.
May 6th, 2009Um.. How about yahoo and wordpress? Do you know how much those websites(listed above) can earn monthly or maybe daily?
May 21st, 2009The stats proves that web 2.O is mushrooming like anything..
May 29th, 2009Do you guys have any idea on what the next web 3.0 will cover?
Informative post made for great reading, the numbers really are staggering. But it’s interesting to see that while there are many social networks (and more starting up) some are/will be fading out. In reality Twitter is only used by a very small percentage of people, the rest of the registered users are dormant. I believe it was a study by Harvard that showed only 10% of Twitterers generating 90% of tweets. (Almost like the taxes, 10% pay 90% of taxes ;)
June 9th, 2009The stats are fantastic. The numbers listed are amazing and they do show the influence of internet in the world! Nice article. Congrats. Thanks.
June 17th, 2009Informative post made for great reading, the numbers really are staggering. But it’s interesting to see that while there are many social networks (and more starting up) some are/will be fading out. In reality Twitter is only used by a very small percentage of people, the rest of the registered users are dormant. I believe it was a study by Harvard that showed only 10% of Twitterers generating 90% of tweets. (Almost like the taxes, 10% pay 90% of taxes ;)
June 27th, 2009Trackbacks
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