A video a day – amazing online numbers for 2010

by Maarten Swemmer Leave a reply »

YouTube announced that in 2010 our world wide population watched a total of 700 billion YouTube videos.  That’s 700,000,000,000 views with 6,887,400,000 people (at the time of writing). Or just over 100 movies per Earth citizen. In 2010 the Internet penetration rate further grew to 28,7 % to about 1,966,514,816 people on June 30, 2010, twice as much as in 2007. That means nearly 2 billion people watched 700 billion movies, or an average of just over 354 movies a year each. Excluding countries where YouTube is forbidden (like China, 420 million Internetters) or where it is not yet available, that’s well over one video a day per Earth citizen with access to YouTube.

Re-Tweeting on TV

With many Twitterers already tweeting about TV series, 2010 was the year the first TV series based on a Twitter feed saw the light. With 1,892,744 followers, @shitmydadsays is followed by nearly 1% of about 200 million expected users. With similar ratings for the TV series, it would be extremely successful. Still the Twitterer only ranks 70 by number of followers.

One third

Facebook has more than 500 million ‘active users’, according to Facebook. That means 25% of all Earth citizens with Internet access and over 32% of Internetters with access to Facebook (also Facebook is not available in China, except Hong Kong and Macau). 32 percent! Almost one third!

Where do all these users come from? Although Alexa is not that reliable, as it only measures users using the Alexa toolbar, with most users in the US, and does not take into account local domains (TLDs), it does provide some general insight. MySpace and Friendster (and probably others) have less reach over time while Facebook’s reach increases. Facebook now scores second on the Alexa Rank, after Google.

Facebook vs Myspace vs Friendster

Facebook vs Myspace vs Friendster

Billions and billions

The total number of indexable web pages was estimated at 11.5 billion in January 2005. One can question whether in today’s fully dynamic  web it actually makes sense to talk in terms of ‘pages’. In the last 12 months 25 billion Tweets were sent (the larger part in the last 6 months). All Facebook users together create about 30 billion pieces of content every month, according to Facebook, or on average two pieces of content a day per user. Add all images, movies, shorturls etc from Youtube, DailyMotion, bit.ly, Flickr, etc, etc and you end up with a huge pile of ‘pages’.

By the way, this last Facebook figure, based on calculations on data provided by Facebook, is 33% lower than the 90 pieces a month that Facebook claims. And that’s actually the problem with these stats. No one, except the three companies the stats come from can prove these amazing, even surreal stats are actually real.