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Social Media and Social Networking by the Numbers

numbers
We all like a few stats to toss into presentations.  Even better if there are charts.  Now I don't necessarily think that numbers tell the best stories, but they can be very compelling to the folks who balance the books and write the cheques.

I found a couple of good resources on social media and social networking numbers that are interesting.  None of them are Canada-specific (still looking for a good source for those), but they do offer a perspective on magnitude and reach around social media and social networking.

The first is from Adam Singer's Future Buzz: 49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats.  It includes numeric tidbits about Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere and Digg.  For example, about YouTube …

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

(sources here, here and here)

Check out the full post for more numeric goodness!

Secondly, there is an older post (Nov 2008) from Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester analyst) where he has pulled together a collection of numbers-oriented links about several social networks.  For example …

Nearly 60% of LinkedIn users have high personal incomes and hold executive-level or consultant positions, Nov 10th, 2008, LinkedIn, Anderson Analytics.

“Although the company claims it has 35 million unique users per month,
independent researcher comScore (SCOR) says that Digg had 16.3 million
users worldwide in October 2008, up 31% from last October’s user base
of 12.4 million”, also “But according to Quantcast’s Web site, Digg.com
claimed 21.7 million global users as of Nov. 30″, Dec 2008, Business Week

Twitter
is dominated by newer users – 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008, An
estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day, 35% of Twitter
users have 10 or fewer followers, 9% of Twitter users follow no one at
all, Dec 08, State of the Twittersphere

There are several updates in the comments as well.  

Oh, and a reminder to check out Michael Garrity's post from Dec about three reports on growth in the digital space.  Some good numbers in these as well.

What are your favourite sources for stats and numbers? Do you have any other recommendations, particularly for Canadian data?

One Comment

  1. Joy Boyson
    Joy Boyson January 15, 2009

    Like that, Kate. Thanks!

Comments are closed.