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Some Metrics Regarding the Volume of Online Activity

by on May 18, 2011 · 610 comments

One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions about just how effective any info control regime can be. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.]  As we continue our research, we’ve been attempting to unearth some good metrics / factoids to help tell this story.  It’s challenging because there aren’t many consistent data sets depicting online data growth over time and some of the best anecdotes from key digital companies are only released sporadically. Anyway, I’d love to hear from others about good metrics and data sets that we should be examining.  In the meantime, here are a few fun facts I’ve unearthed in my research so far. Please let me know if more recent data is available. [Note: Last updated 7/18/11]

  • Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.[1]  People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day.[2]
  • YouTube: every minute, 48 hours of video were uploaded.  According to Peter Kafka of The Wall Street Journal, “That’s up 37 percent in the last six months, and 100 percent in the last year. YouTube says the increase comes in part because it’s easier than ever to upload stuff, and in part because YouTube has started embracing lengthy live streaming sessions. YouTube users are now watching more than 3 billion videos a day. That’s up 50 percent from the last year, which is also a huge leap, though the growth rate has declined a bit: Last year, views doubled from a billion a day to two billion in six months.”[3]
  • eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.[4]
  • Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month).[5]
  • Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days[6] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second)  “On the first day Twitter was made available to the public, 224 tweets were sent. Today, that number of updates are posted at least 10 times a second.”[7]
  • Apple: more than 10 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.[8] According to Chris Burns of SlashGear, “Currently it appears that another thousand apps are downloaded every 9 seconds in the Android Marketplace while every 3 seconds another 1,000 apps are downloaded in the App Store.”
  • Yelp: as of July 2011 the site hosted over 18 million user reviews.[9]
  • Wikipedia: Every six weeks, there are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia.[10]
  • “Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”[11]
  • Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.  This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[12]
  • According to Dave Evans, Cisco’s chief futurist and chief technologist for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, about 5 exabytes of unique information were created in 2008. That’s 1 billion DVDs. Fast forward three years and we are creating 1.2 zettabytes, with one zettabyte equal to 1,024 exabytes. “This is the same as every person on Earth tweeting for 100 years, or 125 million years of your favorite one-hour TV show,” says Evans. Our love of high-definition video accounts for much of the increase. By Cisco’s count, 91% of Internet data in 2015 will be video.[13]

[1]     Ken Deeter, “Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes,” Facebook.com, February 7, 2011, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=496077348919.
[4]     eBay, “Who We Are,” http://www.ebayinc.com/who
[5]     Matt McGee, “By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz,” SearchEngineLand, February 23, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709
[7]     Nicholas Jackson, “Infographic: A Look at Twitter’s Explosive Five-Year History,” The Atlantic, July 18, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/infographic-a-look-at-twitters-explosive-five-year-history/242070
[9]     “10 Things You Should Know about Yelp,” Yelp.com, http://www.yelp.com/about [accessed July 18, 2011]
[10]   “Wikipedia: Edit Growth Measured in Time between Every 10,000,000th Edit,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Katalaveno/TBE
[11]   Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science, February 10, 2011, http://annenberg.usc.edu/News%20and%20Events/News/110210Hilbert.aspx.
[12]   Rex Graham, “Business Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes per Year,” UC San Diego News Center, April 6, 2011, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/04-05BusinessInformation.asp.
[13]   Julie Bort, “10 Technologies That Will Change the World in the Next 10 Years,” Network World, July 15, 2011, http://m.networkworld.com/news/2011/071511-cisco-futurist.html?page=1

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Consumers in the Driver’s Seat—Oh, the Humanity!

by on April 7, 2010 · 9 comments

Yesterday, if you paid attention reeeeally carefully (1, 2, 3, 4), you probably figured out the D.C. Circuit had ruled that Congress hadn’t given the Federal Communications Commission power to regulate the Internet and that the FCC couldn’t bootstrap that power from other authority. It was a rare but welcome affirmation that the rule of law might actually pertain in the regulatory area.

But the Open Internet Coalition put out a release containing threat exaggeration to make Dick Cheney blush:

“Today’s DC Circuit decision . . . creates a dangerous situation, one where the health and openness of broadband Internet is being held hostage by the behavior of the major telco and cable providers.”

That’s right. It’s a hostage-taking when consumers and businesses—and not government—hammer out the terms and conditions of Internet access. Inferentially, the organization representing Google, Facebook, eBay, and Twitter believes that Internet users are too stupid and supine to choose the Internet service they want.

What these content companies are really after, of course, is government support in their tug-of-war with the companies that transport Internet content. It’s hard to know which produces the value of the Internet and which should gain the lion’s share of the rewards. Let the market—not lobbying—decide what reward content and transport deserve for their roles in the Internet ecosystem.

As I said of the Open Internet Coalition’s membership on a saltier, but still relentlessly charming, day: “[T]hese companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.”

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The Opera Ain't Over til E-Commerce Sings

by on November 18, 2009 · 0 comments

Be prepared next week for a cacophony of hand-wringing and prognosticating about retail sales figures reported on “Black Friday.” Retailers traditionally count on holiday shoppers to put them “in the black” for the year with a surge of purchases on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

But if you really want to understand this year’s retail sales picture, wait til the Monday after Thanksgiving. “Black Monday” is day a lot of people return to work, fire up the computer, and begin their online holiday shopping. 

Recent reports suggest that the recession has boosted rather than harmed electronic commerce, for one simple reason: the Internet makes it a lot easier to find the best price for many common purchases. Numerous recent posts tell this story:

Harsh Economy Can’t Shake Love for Online Retailers

Internet Supermaket Booms in Bad Times

Is Online Shopping Affected by a Recession?

The most popular online sites on STORES Magazine’s list include those of established merchants, such as Walmart, Best Buy, JC. Penney, and Target. They also include the pure online plays, such as Amazon.com, eBay, and Overstock.com.  Craigslist — the site where I hunt for used and free stuff — made Stores’ “Top 50” list for the first time this year.  That’s surely a sign that the recession has been a boon to online shopping!

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Free Press, Robert McChesney & the “Struggle” for Media

by on August 10, 2009 · 49 comments

I’ve spent a lot of time here deconstructing and criticizing the proposals set forth by the Free Press, the radical media “reformista” group founded by the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert McChesney.  I have been trying to shine more light on their proposals and activities because I believe they are antithetical to freedom of speech and a free society.  That’s because, as media scholar Ben Compaine has noted, “What the hard core reformistas really want, it seems, is not diversity or an open debate but a media that promotes their own vision of society and the world.”  That’s exactly right and, more specifically, as I argued in my 2005 Media Myths book, the media reformistas want to impose this control by taking the fantasy that “the public owns the [broadcast] airwaves” and extending it to ALL media platforms and outlets.  In other words, McChesney and the Free Press want an UnFree Press.  To cast things in neo-Marxist terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production.  And it begins, McChesney argues, by all of us having to give up this “sort of religious attachment to the idea of a ‘free-press'” from which we all suffer.

Some people accuse me of “red-baiting” or “McCarthyite” tactics when I use the “M-word” (Marxism) or the “S-Word” (socialism) to describe McChesney, the Free Press, and the movement they have spawned.  But these are labels with real meaning and ones that McChesney himself embraces in his work. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Media, he says that “Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement.” He casts everything in “social justice” terms and speaks of the need “to rip the veil off [corporate] power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and as egalitarian as possible.”  What exactly would all that mean in practice for media? In his 2002 book Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle against Corporate Media with John Nichols of The Nation, McChesney argues that media reform efforts must begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media.” They go on to state that, “Our claim is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”

If you want additional proof of his intentions, then I encourage you to read this lengthy interview with McChesney that appears in the new edition of The Bullet, an online newsletter produced by the Canada-based “Socialist Project.”  (If you ask me, there’s something strangely appropriate about a socialist newsletter named “The Bullet” in light of the millions of people who died while living under socialist tyranny!)  Anyway, let’s ignore that and focus on what neo-Marxist media reform entails according to McChesney.  Because never before has he laid his cards on the table as clearly as he does in this interview. Continue reading →

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ICANN’s Implementation Recommendation Team for New gTLDs: Safeguards Needed

by on March 24, 2009 · 11 comments

I’ve been working closely with PFF Adjunct Fellow & former ICANN Board member Michael D. Palage on ICANN issues.  Michael had this to say about the ongoing saga of ICANN’s attempt to create new gTLDs.

During the recent ICANN Board meeting in Mexico City, the Board authorized the creation and funding of an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT).  This team was to be comprised of “an internationally diverse group of persons with knowledge, expertise, and experience in the fields of trademark, consumer protection, or competition law, and the interplay of trademarks and the domain name system to develop and propose solutions to the overarching issue of trademark protection in connection with the introduction of new gTLDs.” This IRT is tasked to produce a report for consideration by the ICANN community at the Sydney meeting.

The IRT consists of 24 members:

  • Chairwoman Caroline G. Chicoine; and
  • Seventeen members; and
  • Six ex officio members:  Four IPC-elected officers and two-GNSO elected Board Directors (Bruce Tonkin and Rita Rodin Johnston).  

I have a number of friends and colleagues serving on this team and I wish them well in their important endeavor.

I’ve previously proposed a number of rights-protection mechanisms that IRT should consider.  Today, I offer a few suggestions that I hope will guide IRT as they embark on their important work tomorrow.  In particular, I hope they’ll implement some of my suggestions intended to make the IRT process more transparent-so the rest of the global Internet can follow along with their important work and provide constructive input where possible.

Continue reading →

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