1. What is progress?
2. What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?
3. If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I was honored to be asked by Clay Routledge to contribute answers to those questions alongside others, including: Steven Pinker (Harvard University), Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress), Matt Clancy (Institute for Progress), Marian Tupy (Human​Progress​.org), James Pethokoukis (AEI). I encourage you to jump over the roundtable and read all their excellent responses. I’ve included my answers down below:

What is progress?

Progress is the advancement of human health, happiness, and general well-being. Measures of well-being can be challenging, however, so we should consider a broad range of metrics, including: life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty measures, energy production/consumption, GDP, productivity, agricultural yields/nourishment, and access to various important goods, services, and conveniences. While each of these metrics may have limitations, taken together, they stand for something meaningful that represents a rough proxy for progress.

But we should always remember what progress means at a deeper level for every individual. Innovation and economic growth are important because they allow us to live lives of our own choosing and enjoy the fruits of a prosperous, pluralistic society.  Progress “is not just bigger piles of money,” as Hans Rosling once noted. “The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.”  Accordingly, we should aim to broaden the range of opportunities available to all people to help them flourish.

What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?

The most significant threat to continued progress is the risk of stagnation accompanying efforts to protect the status quo. As Virginia Postrel taught us in her wonderful book The Future & Its Enemies, we should reject stasis-minded thinking and instead shoot for a world of dynamism, which cherishes and protects the freedom to think and act differently.

Progress hinges upon the growth of knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience, and the most important experiences involve trial-and-error learning. Public attitudes and policies that restrict people and ideas from intermingling freely are a recipe for intellectual, social, and economic stagnation. Accordingly, when we consider public policies toward progress, we should first seek to identify and remove legal and regulatory impediments that limit risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, and technological innovation. As science writer Matt Ridley provocatively puts it, to unlock more growth and prosperity, we must first remove obstacles to “ideas having sex.”

The free movement of people and capital is essential to this process. Openness to immigration is the easiest way for a nation to expand its potential for innovation and growth. But domestic labor skills and mobility are equally important. For entrepreneurs and workers, we need to reframe the battle for progress as “the freedom to innovate” and “the right to earn a living.”

Unfortunately, many barriers exist to advancing those goals, like occupational licensing rules and permitting processes, cronyist industrial protectionist schemes, inefficient tax schemes, and many other layers of regulatory red tape. Reforming or eliminating such rules is crucial for broadening opportunities.

Finally, we need to address cultural barriers to progress. Technology and entrepreneurs often get a bad rap in the media and popular culture. Fear and pessimism dominate their narratives. We must do a better job communicating the benefits of openness to change and give people more reasons to be optimistic about a dynamic future.

If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I agree with Yogi Berra that “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Nonetheless, history shows we can achieve remarkable things when we get the prerequisites for progress right and let people tap into their inherent inquisitiveness and inventiveness. Moving the needle on innovation and growth even just a little will yield compounding returns to future generations. But we should dare to dream bigger and think what progress means for each person today and in the future.

A pro-progress agenda will help us lead longer lives and significantly expand our capabilities because that is what people have always desired most. Accordingly, I believe the most significant advance of the next 50 years will be a radical increase in life expectancy and dramatic improvements in our physical and mental capabilities while we are alive.

Today’s tech critics often claim that technological innovation somehow undermines our humanity. They couldn’t be more wrong. There are few things more human than acts of invention. When we take steps to address practical human needs and wants, we enrich our lives and the lives of countless others. The future will be wonderful, so long as we are free to make it so.

This is a compendium of readings on “ progress studies ,” or essays and books which generally make the case for technological innovation, dynamism, economic growth, and abundance. I will update this list as additional material of relevance is brought to my attention.   

[Last update: 10/11/22]

Recent Essays

• Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a16z.com, October 16, 2023.
• Will Rinehart, “The Abundance Agenda,” The Exformation Newsletter, October 15, 2022.
• Sarah Constantin, “Unblocking Abundance: A Model for Activism,” Rough Diamonds, October 10, 2022.
• Derek Thompson, “The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress,” The Atlantic, May 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Forum, April 23, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “The Case for American Seriousness,” Common Sense, April 18, 2022.
• William Rinehart, “Vetocracy, the Costs of Vetos and Inaction,” Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, March 24, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America?” Faster Please, March 23, 2022.
• John W. Lettieri & Kenan Fikri, “The Case for Economic Dynamism and Why it Matters for the American Worker,” Economic Innovation Group, March 2022.
• Adam Kovacevich, “Saying YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) to “Civic Innovation,” Chamber of Progress, March 21, 2022.
• Eli Dourado, “Remove Barriers to Productivity,” City Journal, March 18, 2022.
• “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” (A conversation with Jason Crawford), Discourse, March 2, 2022.
• Noah Smith, “A New Industrialist Roundup,” Noahpinion, February 3, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “When Will the Next Big Thing Arrive?” Faster Please, February 3, 2022.
• Alec Stapp & Caleb Watney,  “ Progress is a Policy Choice ,” Institute for Progress, January 20, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “ How to Get the Future We Were Promised ,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “ Building American Dynamism ,” Future, January 14, 2022.  
• Derek Thompson, “ A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems ,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.
• Jason Crawford, “Progress, Humanism, Agency: An Intellectual Core for the Progress Movement,” Roots of Progress, January 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
• Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for More Energy,” October 7, 2021.
• Jason Crawford, “ We need a new philosophy of progress ,” The Roots of Progress, August 23, 2021.
• Gale Pooley & Marian L. Tupy, “The Simon Abundance Index 2021,” Human Progress, April 22, 2021.
• Noah Smith, “ Techno-optimism for the 2020s ,” December 3, 2020. 
• Ezra Klein, “ Why We Can’t Build ,” Vox, April 22, 2020.
• Marc Andreesen, “ It’s Time to Build ,” Future, April 18, 2020.
• Eli Dourado, “ How do we move the needle on progress ?” September 26, 2019.
• José Luis Ricón, “ About the ‘Progress’ in Progress Studies ” September 6, 2019.
• Will Rinehart, “ Progress Studies: Some Initial Thoughts ,” August 30, 2019.
• Adam Thierer, “ Is There a Science of Progress ?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “ We Need a New Science of Progress ,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2019.
• Tyler Cowen, “ The Case for the Longer Term ,” Cato Unbound, January 9, 2019.
• Vinod Khosla, “ We Need Large Innovations ,” Medium, January 1, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity ,” Medium, November 19, 2018. 
• Chelsea Follett, “Utopianism: One of the Biggest Obstacles to Progress,” Human Progress, August15, 2018.
• Eli Dourado, “ How Technological Innovation Can Massively Reduce the Cost of Living ,” PlainText, January 29, 2016.

Books

• J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car ? (Stripe Press, 2021).
• Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (New York: Harper, 2020).
• Andrew McAfee, More from Less (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).
• Ronald Bailey & Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute, 2020).
• Arthur M. Diamond Jr., Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2018).
• Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).
• Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
• Tim Harford, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
• Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom , 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• Calestous Juma, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Joe Carlen, A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
• Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).
• Larry Downes, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
• Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
• Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
• Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
• David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some are So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998).
• Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
• Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
• Nathan Rosenberg and L. E.. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
• Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976, 1994).

[Updated: March 2022]

I was speaking at a conference recently and discussing my life’s work, which for 30 years has been focused on the importance of innovation and intellectual battles over what we mean progress. I put together up a short list of some things I have written over the last few years on this topic and thought I would just re-post them here. I will try to keep this regularly updated, at least for a few years.

UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGE WE FACE:

• Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides (November 2021)
• How to Get the Future We Were Promised (January 2022)
• The Radicalization of Modern Tech Criticism (April 2019)
• Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology? (September 2018)

HOW WE MUST RESPOND = “Rational Optimism” / Right to Earn a Living / Permissionless Innovation

• A Case for Innovation and Optimism (A conversation with Jason Crawford, March 2022)
• How To Defend a Culture of Innovation During the Technopanic (April 2019)
• Is This the End of Permissionless Innovation? (January 2021)
• How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity (November 2018)
• Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream? (September 2018)
• The Right to Pursue Happiness, Earn a Living, and Innovate (September 2018)
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (2016)

ADDITIONAL READING:

• Is There a Science of Progress?  (August 2019)
• Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: A Brief Report on the Evidence (March 2019)
• 5 Books that Shaped My Thinking on Innovation (April 2020)
• Innovation and the Trouble with the Precautionary Principle (April 2020)

NEW BOOK (tying together all the essays and papers listed above):

• Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments (2020)

Why should we really care about technological innovation? My Mercatus Center colleague James Broughel and I have just published a paper answering that question. In “Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: A Brief Report on the Evidence,” we summarize the extensive body of evidence that discusses the relationship between innovation, growth, and human prosperity. We note that while economists, political scientists, and historians don’t agree on much, there exists widespread consensus among them that there is a symbiotic relationship between the pace of innovation and the progress of civilization. Our 27-page paper documenting the academic evidence on this issue can be downloaded on SSRN or from the Mercatus website. Here’s the abstract:

Technological innovation is a fundamental driver of economic growth and human progress. Yet some critics want to deny the vast benefits that innovation has bestowed and continues to bestow on mankind. To inform policy discussions and address the technology critics’ concerns, this paper summarizes relevant literature documenting the impact of technological innovation on economic growth and, more broadly, on living standards and human well-being. The historical record is unambiguous regarding how ongoing innovation has improved the way we live; however, the short-term disruptive aspects of technological change are real and deserve attention as well. The paper concludes with an extended discussion about the relevance of these findings for shaping cultural attitudes toward technology and the role that public policy can play in fostering innovation, growth, and ongoing improvements in the quality of life of citizens.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently delivered an excellent speech at the Resurgent Conference, Austin, TX. In it, he stressed the importance of adopting a permissionless innovation policy vision to ensure a bright future for technology, economic growth, and consumer welfare. The whole thing is worth your time, but the last two paragraphs make two essential points worth highlighting.

Pai correctly notes that we should reject the sort of knee-jerk hysteria or technopanic mentality that sometimes accompanies new technologies. Instead, we should have some patience and humility in the face of uncertainty and be open to new ideas and technologies creations.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Pai concludes:

Whenever a technological innovation creates uncertainty, some will always have the knee-jerk reaction to presume it’s bad. They’ll demand that we do whatever’s necessary to maintain the status quo. Strangle it with a study. Call for a commission. Bemoan those supposedly left behind. Stipulate absolute certainty. Regulate new services with the paradigms of old. But we should resist that temptation. “Guilty until proven innocent” is not a recipe for innovation, and it doesn’t make consumers better off. History tells us that it is not preemptive regulation, but permissionless innovation made possible by competitive free markets that best guarantees consumer welfare. A future enabled by the next generation of technology can be bright, if only we choose to let the light in.

Read the whole thing here. Good stuff. I also appreciate him citing my work on the topic, which you can find in my last book and other publications.

The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is already growing at a breakneck pace and is expected to continue to accelerate rapidly. In a short new paper (“Projecting the Growth and Economic Impact of the Internet of Things“) that I’ve just released with my Mercatus Center colleague Andrea Castillo, we provide a brief explanation of IoT technologies before describing the current projections of the economic and technological impacts that IoT could have on society. In addition to creating massive gains for consumers, IoT is projected to provide dramatic improvements in manufacturing, health care, energy, transportation, retail services, government, and general economic growth. Take a look at our paper if you’re interested, and you might also want to check out my 118-page law review article, “The Internet of Things and Wearable Technology: Addressing Privacy and Security Concerns without Derailing Innovation” as well as my recent congressional testimony on the policy issues surrounding the IoT.)

Over the course of the year, I collect some of my favorite (and least favorite) tech policy essays and put them together in an end-of-year blog post so I will remember notable essays in the future. (Here’s my list from 2013.) Here are some of the best tech policy essays I read in 2014 (in chronological order).

• Joel Mokyr – “The Next Age of Invention,” City Journal, Winter 2014. (An absolutely beautiful refutation of the technological pessimism that haunts our age. Mokry concludes by noting that, “technology will continue to develop and change human life and society at a rate that may well dwarf even the dazzling developments of the twentieth century. Not everyone will like the disruptions that this progress will bring. The concern that what we gain as consumers, viewers, patients, and citizens, we may lose as workers is fair. The fear that this progress will create problems that no one can envisage is equally realistic. Yet technological progress still beats the alternatives; we cannot do without it.” Mokyr followed it up with a terrific August 8 Wall Street Journal oped, “What Today’s Economic Gloomsayers Are Missing.“)
• Michael Moynihan – “ Can a Tweet Put You in Prison? It Certainly Will in the UK ,”  The Daily Beast , January 23, 2014. (Great essay on the right and wrong way to fight online hate. Here’s the kicker: “There is a presumption that ugly ideas are contagious and if the already overburdened police force could only disinfect the Internet, racism would dissipate. This is arrant nonsense.”)
• Hanni Fakhoury –  “ The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs,” Wired , January 23, 2014. (“We shouldn’t let the government’s fear of computers justify disproportionate punishment. . . . It’s time for the government to learn from its failed 20th century experiment over-punishing drugs and start making sensible decisions about high-tech punishment in the 21st century.”)
• Carole Cadwalladr – “Meet Cody Wilson, Creator of the 3D-gun, Anarchist, Libertarian,” Guardian/Observer, February 8, 2014. (Entertaining profile of one of the modern digital age’s most fascinating characters. “There are enough headlines out there which ask: Is Cody Wilson a terrorist? Though my favourite is the one that asks: ‘Cody Wilson: troll, genius, patriot, provocateur, anarchist, attention whore, gun nut or Second Amendment champion.’ Though it could have added, ‘Or b) all of the above?'”)

• Michael Sacasas – “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Technology?” February 14, 2014, and “Traditions of Technological Criticism,” February 15, 2014. (Sacasas continues his discussion of differing conceptions of the term “technology.” In the process, he surveys a wide swath of technology theorists & critics and then offers a rough taxonomy grouping them in various ways. Terrifically interesting. Note: I used Michael’s posts as the launching point for a blog post of my own on, “Defining ‘Technology.'”)
• Glenn Garvin – “TV’s Deregulated Golden Age: Why so few critics understand what made HBO possible,” Reason, February 2014. (Garvin explains how freedom to innovate was the key ingredient in unleashing the modern Golden Age of television. I love the opening lines: “For decades, no art form was more meticulously regulated by the government than television. For decades, no art form was more relentlessly bashed by its critics. Amazingly, nobody ever seems to make a connection between these two facts.” So damn true.)
• Antonis Polemitis – “Bitcoin Series 19: Bizarre Shadowy Paper-Based Payment System Being Rolled Out Worldwide,” Ledra Capital blog, February 17, 2014. (An absolutely epic satire of the Bitcoin technopanic. Hugely entertaining.)
• Eli Dourado – “Why the Left Doesn’t Have to Hate Innovation,” The Umlaut, April 2, 2014. (A sharp response to an Evgeny Morozov rant about innovation policy.)
• John Villasenor – “The Future Of Innovation: Five Things We Can Learn From Bitcoin,” Forbes, May 12, 2014. (Offers “five things that the growth of cryptocurrencies can teach us about the future of innovation.”)
• Marc Andreesen – “This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs…,” Andreessen Horowitz blog, June 13, 2014. (Andreessen single-handedly revolutionized Twitter posting style in 2014 with his “Twitterstorm” format of essentially blogging via multi-part tweets. His mini-manifestos are powerful stuff, and none were better than this one, which he thankfully transcribed and posted to his firm’s blog. In it, he lays out the optimistic case for robotic automation and the many benefits he believes it will bring to society.)
• Adam Thierer – “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014. (Is it wrong to put one of my own essays on this list. Probably! But I am quite proud of this one and, if nothing else, I hope it offers others a good reading list on the topic. Specifically, the essay surveys the extensive writing on “heaven” and “hell” scenarios about the impact of technological change on society.)
• Peter W. Singer & Allan Friedman, “The 5 Biggest Cybersecurity Myths, Debunked,” Wired, July 2, 2014. (Singer & Friedman inject some much-needed sanity back into the techno-panicky debates over cybersecurity and “cyberwar.”)
• Daniel Akst, “What Can We Learn From Past Anxiety Over Automation?” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2014. (A nice look back at a century’s worth of hand-wringing over the looming threat of automation and job-displacement.)
• Clive Thompson, “How a 1974 sci-fi novel for teens eerily predicted the rise of personal drones,” Medium, September 5, 2014. (Probably my favorite essay of the year since Clive manages to combine lessons from one my favorite childhood books along with my current fascination with “precautionary principle” thinking. Splendid writing, as always, from Thompson.)
• Jason Feifer, “The Internet is Not Harming You. Here’s What’s Harmful: Fearmongering about the Internet,” Fast Company, November 2014. (“Falsely romanticizing the past allows us to think that we stand at a threshold as some last vestige of better, tech-disconnected humans. The truth is that as culture evolves our priorities change as well.”)
• Adam Elkus – “Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence,” Slate, October 31, 2014. (Elkus pushes back against what he regards as the growing technopanic over artificial intelligence.)
• Steven Johnson – “We’re living the dream; we just don’t realize it,” CNN, November 28, 2014.  (“Americans enjoy longer, healthier lives in more stable families and communities than we did 20 years ago. But other than the crime trends, these facts are rarely reported or shared via word-of-mouth channels.”)
• Blake Ross – “Uber.gov: It’s Time to Let the Government Drive,” Medium, December 2, 2014. (A fun tongue-and-cheek piece about just how badly Las Vegas, Nevada — like many other governments — have mangled their “consumer protection” mandate when it comes to transportation services.)

And my nominees for Worst Tech Policy Essays of 2014 go to:

• Evgeny Morozov – “Stunt the Growth” (As the old saying goes, you can’t put lipstick on a pig, but preeminent techno-crank Evgeny Morozov certainly tries his darnedest to dress up Ludditism and make it sexy in this elitist rant endorsing a “degrowth” movement for the world of information technology.)
• Anthony Weiner – “Here’s What Tesla And The Other Silicon Valley ‘Disruptors’ Don’t Get About Politics” (An astonishing defense of cronyist and protectionist state laws that harm consumer welfare. In essence, Weiner says that disruptive entrepreneurs should just shut up on get on with the business of playing ball with politicians and regulators. Don’t rock the boat, you damn innovators!)
• Richard Eskow – “Let’s nationalize Amazon and Google: Publicly funded technology built Big Tech” (Yes, some people still think converting tech companies into public utilities is a good idea. Do I really need to explain why that’s such a bad idea? OK, well I did in this 62-page paper!)

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.

[Hat tip to Richard Bennett for the recommendation here..] I haven’t had a chance to read through the entire thing yet, but this new study by Nemertes Research seems worthy of attention: “Internet Interrupted: Why Architectural Limitations Will Fracture the ‘Net.” From the exec sum:

In 2007, Nemertes Research conducted the first-ever study to independently model Internet and IP infrastructure (which we call “capacity”) and current and projected traffic (which we call “demand”) with the goal of evaluating how each changes over time. In that study, we concluded that if current trends were to continue, demand would outstrip capacity before 2012. Specifically, access bandwidth limitations will throttle back innovation, as users become increasingly frustrated with their ability to run sophisticated applications over primitive access infrastructure. This year, we revisit our original study, update the data and our model, and extend the study to look beyond physical bandwidth issues to assess the impact of potential logical constraints. Our conclusion? The situation is worse than originally thought! We continue to project that capacity in the core, and connectivity and fiber layers will outpace all conceivable demand for the near future. However, demand will exceed access line capacity within the next two to four years. Even factoring in the potential impact of a global economic recession on both demand (users purchasing fewer Internet-attached devices and services) and capacity (providers slowing their investment in infrastructure) changes the impact by as little as a year (either delaying or accelerating, depending on which is assumed to have the greater effect).

This is a subject that my colleague Bret Swanson has written a great deal about, so I’m sure he’ll be commenting on this study at some point.  Even if you don’t agree with the conclusion Nemertes reaches, as Richard Bennett notes, the report is well worth reading just the background information on public and private peering, content delivery networks, and overlay networks.