Electronic lifestyle for rising tide of people

Here are some social media ‘stats’ that will blow your mind, says Troy Stanley in this week’s column.

We are increasingly encouraged to blog this, flicker that and face book the other, before you know it you’re twittering here, digging there and Googling everywhere...

As our electronic and physical lives become further obscured in the virtual cloud that is the internet, the web has, for many, become an integral part of their lives. It is our primary source of communication and networking, a place where we work, rest and play...

Just how integrated into our lives and how reliant we’ve become on social networking and web 2.0 sites is scarily illustrated when you start looking at the statistical analysis. The numbers are mind-blowing and truly awesome.

Below is a snapshot of the statistics from some of the major social networking and web 2.0 sites on the net today. As I say, awesome.  Enjoy...

Google search stats:
Rough number of daily searches:
2004: 2,000,000 (two million) per day
2008: 2,000,000,000 (two billion) per day
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index.
$110,000,000 - approx amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button
24,400 - people employed by Google (Dec 2008)
68,000,000 - average number of times people Googled the word ‘Google’ each month for the last year
$39.96 - average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords
1,430,000 - number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”
136,000 - number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”

Wikipedia stats:
2,695,205 - articles in English on Wikipedia
684,000,000 - visitors to Wikipedia in the last year
75,000 - active contributors to Wikipedia
10,000,000 - total articles in Wikipedia in all languages
260 - number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia

YouTube stats:
70,000,000 - total videos on YouTube (March 2008)
200,000 - video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)
100,000,000 - videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)
112,486,327 - views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)
2 minutes 46.17 seconds - average length of video
412.3 years - time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)
26.57 - average age of uploader
13 hours - amount of video 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 - blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
346,000,000 - people globally who read blogs
7.4 million - Blogs posted in the last 120 days
900,000 - blog posts in a 24-hour period
1,750,000 - RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (Jan 2009)
77% - active internet users who read blogs
81 - languages represented in the blogosphere
59% - bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

Twitter stats:
1,111,991,000 - Tweets to date
3,000,000 - Tweets/day(March 2008)
165,414 - followers of the most popular Twitter user (@BarackObama) - but he’s not active
86,078 - followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)
63% - Twitter users that are male

Facebook stats:
150,000,000 - active users
170 - countries/territories that use Facebook
35 - different languages used on Facebook
2,600,000,000 - minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily
100 - friends the average user has
700,000,000 - photos added to Facebook monthly
52,000 - applications currently available on Facebook
140 - new applications added per day

Digg stats:
236,000,000 - visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)
56% - Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users
612 - stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg
37,925 - Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received see story - https://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Digg_This_If_You_Voted_For_Obama_2

* Troy Stanley is technical director at Resource Techniques (www.resourcetechniques.com) and is writing a series on tech subjects for our readers