Very cool little video here by Jess3 documenting Internet growth and activity. Ironically, Berin sent it to me as Adam Marcus and I were updating the lengthy list of Net & online media stats you’ll find down below. Many of the stats we were compiling are shown in the video. Enjoy!

• 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; an 18% increase from the previous year.^[1]
• 81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET names & 7.8 million .ORG names.^[2]
• 234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.^[3] In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average of 120.5 Web pages each day.^[4]
• There are roughly 26 million blogs on the Internet^[5] and even back in 2007, there were over 1.5 million new blog posts every day (17 posts per second).^[6]
• In December 2009, 86% of the total U.S. online population viewed video content.^[7] The average online viewer watched 187 videos (up 95 percent from the previous year), while the average video length viewed grew from 3.2 to 4.1 minutes.^[8] The majority of online video viewing (52%) occurred at video sites ranked outside of the top 25, suggesting the increased fragmentation of online video and the emergence of sites in the “long tail.”^[9]
• YouTube reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute,^[10] and 1 billion videos are served up daily by YouTube, or 12.2 billion videos viewed per month.^[11]
• For video hosting site Hulu, as of Nov 2009, 924 million videos were viewed per month in the U.S.^[12]
• Developers have created over 140,000 apps for the Apple iPhone and iPod and iPad and made them available in the Apple App Store.^[13] Customers in 77 countries can choose apps in 20 categories, and users have downloaded over three billion apps since its inception in July 2008.^[14] Apple’s iTunes Store has a catalog of 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes, and 8,500 movies. It has sold more than 10 billion songs.^[15]
• Social networking giant Facebook reports that each month, its 400+ million users upload more than 3 billion photos, and create over 3.5 million events. More than 3 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week. There are also more than 3 million active Pages on the site.^[16]
• There are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia every seven weeks.^[17]
• Twitter users send out 50 million tweets per day, an average of 600 tweets per second.^[18]
• 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009.^[19]

[2] Id.

[3] Id.

[4] Gavin O’Malley, Comcast Taps Hispanic Web Portal, MediaPost News, Online Media Daily, March 8, 2006, www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=40714

[5] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[6] David Sifry, The State of the Live Web, April 2007, www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html

[7] comScore, The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review – A Recap of the Year in Digital Marketing 10, Feb. 2010, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/2/comScore_Releases_2009_U.S._Digital_Year_in_Review.

[8] Id.

[9] Id. at 12.

[10] Ryan Junee, Zoinks! 20 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute!, Broadcasting Ourselves: The Official YouTube Blog, May 20, 2009, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/05/zoinks-20-hours-of-video-uploaded-every_20.html

[11] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[12] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[13] Apple, 140,000 apps at your fingertips. From day one., www.apple.com/ipad/app-store.

[14] Press Release, Apple, Apple’s App Store Downloads Top Three Billion (Jan. 5, 2010), www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html

[15] Press Release, Apple, iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold (Feb. 25, 2010), www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html.

[16] Facebook, Statistics, www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (last accessed Mar. 2, 2010).

[17] Katalaveno, Edit growth measured in time between every 10,000,000^th edit, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Katalaveno/TBE (last accessed Mar. 2, 2010).

[18] Twitter Blog, Measuring Tweets, Feb. 22, 2010, http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html.

[19] Royal Pingdom, supra.

Most of you have probably already seen this but Pingdom recently aggregated and posted some amazing stats about “Internet 2009 In Numbers.”  Worth checking them all out, but here are some highlights:

• 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; 18% increase in Internet users since previous year.
• 81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET & 7.8 million .ORG
• 234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.
• 90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009; 1.4 billion email users worldwide.
• 26 million blogs on the Internet.
• 27.3 million tweets on Twitter per day as of Nov 2009.
• 350 million people on Facebook; 50% of them log in every day; + 500,000 active Facebook applications.
• 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009; 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 1 billion videos served by YouTube each day; 12.2 billion videos viewed per month; 924 million videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US as of Nov 2009; + the average Internet user in the US watches 182 online videos each month.

And yet some people claim that digital generativity and online innovation are dead!   Things have never been better.

I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before in my essays on “Internet optimists vs. pessimists” (See: 1, 2, 3).

I have a complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil now up on the City Journal‘s website here.  I’ve also pasted it down below.

Plato Wrote it Down by Adam Thierer

a review of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, by Dennis Baron (Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $24.95)

In the beginning, Dennis Baron reminds us in his new book, A Better Pencil, there was the word—the spoken word, that is. Oral tradition, the passing of knowledge through stories and lectures, was the primary method of instruction and learning throughout early human civilization. But then a few innovative souls decided to start writing everything down on stones and clay. Almost as soon as they did, a great debate began on the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And it rages on today, with a new generation of optimists and skeptics battling over the impact that computing, the Internet, and digital technologies have on our lives and on how we learn about the world.

Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, begins his splendid history of these debates with the well-known tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. The Egyptian god Theuth boasts to King Thamus about how his invention of writing will improve the wisdom and memory of the masses. Thamus shoots back, “The discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.” Thamus then passes judgment on writing’s impact on society, saying he fears that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Of course, as Baron points out, we remember this warning only “because Plato wrote it down.” It’s one of the recurrent ironies in the history of techno-skepticism that while “the shock of the new often brings out critics eager to warn us away,” those critics often embrace—or, at the very least, benefit from—the very tools that they want the rest of us to shun. Whether it’s Luddites On-Line winning Yahoo’s “Cool Site of the Day” award, or the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association promoting National Handwriting Day via the Internet, or Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto attracting unprecedented readership thanks to its availability on the Web, those who have a “common tendency to romanticize the good old ways” of doing things often fail to appreciate how new technology can benefit society—including themselves.

Baron walks us through a litany of historical examples—the printing press, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters, pocket calculators, personal computers, word processors, webpages, blogs, social-networking sites, and more—and identifies the usual pattern: we greet each new technology with deep distrust and dire warnings, but in time we adapt to the new realities. Indeed, as a species, we have an unparalleled ability to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t always like technological change, and often we deeply resent or fear it, but in the end, we learn to live with it and eventually to embrace it.

With the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, we see this pattern unfolding once again. “According to the latest generation of critics and naysayers,” Baron notes, “today it is computers that are producing texts whose value and credibility we question; computers that are giving too many people control over the creation and publication of text; computers that are wreaking havoc with our handwriting.” Contemporary critics also fret over “information overload.”

The backlash against computers and digitization began while the Internet was still in its cradle, with the 1992 publication of Neil Postman’s anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman’s intellectual descendants include Internet critics such as Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, and Mark Helprin, whose works drip with disdain for all things digital. They warn of a coming dystopia where truth and authority vanish, culture crumbles, and political polarization breeds closed-mindedness and even the death of deliberative democracy.

These overly pessimistic critics turn a blind eye to both the wonders of the digital age and humanity’s ability to adapt. As Baron persuasively argues, “English survives, conversation thrives online as well as off, and on balance, digital communications seems to be enhancing human interaction, not detracting from it.” In fact, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that previous generations would have found unimaginable. As Baron puts it: “The Internet is a true electronic frontier where everyone is on his or her own: all manuscripts are accepted for publication, they remain in virtual print forever, and no one can tell writers what to do.” Such human empowerment is worth celebrating, even if it does have the occasional downside. Abundance is better than a world of scarce choices and few voices.

Baron’s retelling of the history of techno-skepticism is edifying, but it leaves one with the nagging feeling that these debates will never cease. Each generation will witness a technological watershed that brings out a fresh crop of both pollyannas and pessimists. Like Plato, however, most of us will embrace whatever’s next and move forward.

“Liberty upsets patterns.” That was one of the many lessons that the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick taught us in his 1974 masterpiece “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” What Nozick meant was that there is a fundamental tension between liberty and egalitarianism such that when people are left to their own devices, some forms of inequality would be inevitable and persistent throughout society. (Correspondingly, any attempt to force patterns, or outcomes, upon society requires a surrender of liberty.)

No duh, right? Most people understand this today–even if some of them are all too happy to hand their rights over to the government in exchange for momentary security or some other promise.  In the world of media policy, however, many people still labor under the illusion that liberty and patterned equality are somehow reconcilable. That is, some media policy utopians and Internet pollyannas would like us to believe that if you give every man, woman, and child a platform on which to speak, everyone will be equally heard.  Moreover, in pursuit of that goal, some of them argue government should act to “upset patterns” and push to achieve more “balanced” media outcomes. That is the philosophy that has guided the “media access” movement for decades and it what fuels the “media reformista” movement that is led by groups like the (inappropriately named) Free Press, which was founded by neo-Marxist media theorist Robert McChesney.

Alas, perfect media equality remains an illusive pipe dream. As I have pointed out here before, there has never been anything close to “equal outcomes” when it comes to the distribution or relative success of books, magazines, music, movies, book sales, theater tickets, etc.  A small handful of titles have always dominated, usually according to a classic “power law” or “80-20” distribution, with roughly 20% of the titles getting 80% of the traffic / revenue.  And this trend is increasing, not decreasing, for newer and more “democratic” online media.

For example, recent research has revealed that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets” and  “the top 15% of the most prolific [Wkipedia] editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits.” As Clay Shirky taught us back in 2003 in this classic essay, the same has long held true for blogging, where outcomes are radically inegalitarian, with a tiny number of blogs getting the overwhelming volume of blogosphere attention.  The reason, Shirky pointed out, is that:

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

The latest proof of the persistence of power laws in the media world comes from Slate’s Chris Wilson, who recently analyzed traffic distribution over on YouTube to answer the question: “Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?” Alas, YouTube proves every bit as anti-egalitarian as every other media platform throughout history:

This is the great promise of YouTube: Your video can soar in popularity through sheer word-of mouth—or rather, click-of-mouth—until eventually people are making T-shirts about it. No one ever said this was going to happen for everyone. So, what are your chances of achieving YouTube stardom? I crunched the numbers to find out what percentage of YouTube videos hit it big, cracking even 10,000 or 100,000 views. The results: You might have better odds playing the lottery than of becoming a viral video sensation.

And after he runs the numbers to show how such a small percentage of videos dominate YouTube, Wilson goes on to note:

These figures certainly don’t ratify the grand promise of social media. Not everyone uses YouTube to launch their showbiz or political career, but the potential to do so is central to the Web 2.0 narrative that figures in so many newsmagazine panegyrics. When the odds of even 1,000 people viewing your video in a month’s time are only 3 percent, however, it’s tough to argue that hitting it big on YouTube is anything more than dumb luck. You could argue that this is the way it’s always been in show biz, and you’d be right. But wasn’t the Web supposed to change all that?

Indeed, why is that?  After all, as Wilson suggests, the Internet, blogs, social networks, Twitter, YouTube, and so on, were the revolutionary platforms that were supposed to democratize all media and give everyone a fighting chance to be heard.  Instead, power laws and media inequality have proven relentlessly persistent.  Here’s how I explained why this is the case in an earlier essay:

There are several reasons that power laws always exist in all media contexts. We used to think it was because the economics of media are quite different than most other industries. Namely, media industries typically exhibit “public good” qualities; high fixed (production costs), but lower distribution costs.  But the primary reason why power laws are probably more prevent in media industries than other sectors of the economy is because the creation and consumption of news and popular culture is a truly social phenomenon. Think of it as the economics of popular choice and the sociology of fashion and fads. People (and consumers) react to what others are reading or watching. Word-of-mouth counts. Bandwagon effects exist. First-mover advantages are significant. And so on.  The end result is a hopeless imbalance of outcomes or outputs.  Media egalitarianism is simply an impossibility.

OK, so now that I’ve said all this and rained on the New-Media-Will-Produce-Perfect-Outcomes-Parade, let me explain why NONE OF THIS MAKES A DAMN BIT OF DIFFERENCE.   What is really important is equality of media opportunity, not equality of media outcomes.  A focus on the latter is both foolish and destructive. It is foolish because media equality is an impossibility absent extreme measures, which in turn explains why it is destructive. We would need totalitarian government controls on media outputs and consumption in order to achieve anything remotely close to “balance” or “equality” in terms of media results.

Again, all that really counts is that people have a chance to be heard, not whether millions are listening.  New media platforms really do change some things for the better because at least we now all have an equal chance to make a go at it and grab a bit of that audience. That’s certainly more than could be said back in the old analog media world, in which we suffered from outlet scarcity and information poverty. Today, by contrast, will live in a wonderful world of media abundance, where every man, woman, and child really does have a soapbox on which to stand and speak to the world.

Of course, no one may be listening.  And there will always be someone else who will nab greater audience share than you.

Get used to it. It is the way the media world has always worked, and it is the way every media platform will work until the end of time.  So long as citizens are free to choose, media inequality is inevitable.

The WashingtonWatch.com blog is entering its second year.

Via ParisLemon… Here’s a really outstanding (albeit somewhat vulgar) slide show about the increasing importance of social media and how social networking is profoundly changing the way we humans communicate. Some great stats in there.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=whatthefissocialmedia070208-1215026815612657-8

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