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.

I’ve always viewed web traffic numbers with great suspicion, if for no other reason than they are all over the board. But the amazing Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal’s “numbers guy,” does us another great service today in his latest column, “The Trouble With Web-Traffic Numbers,” by walking us through exactly how big of a mess these numbers really are. Carl is the closest thing we have to a statistical ombudsman for the Internet as he repeatedly illustrates in his column how numbers can deceive and distort.

In terms of bogus web traffic numbers, there’s plenty of distortion going on. He quotes Erin Pettigrew, marketing director for Gawker Media, as saying that “For an industry that relies so heavily on accurate data and numerical accountability, relying on an estimate is embarrassing, antiquated.” Too true.  Of course, with so many people frequently deleting their cookies and now accessing websites from different machines, it’s not surprising that the numbers are such a jumble.

One of the reasons it’s so important to try to improve web traffic metrics is because it is essential to the advertising business, which powers the web and all the great content and services we consume online. More accurate web traffic metrics can help better direct and target ads across the web. But it won’t be easy.

Anyway, read Carl’s piece for all the details. And thank you Carl for always reminding us that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Dennis McCauley of Gamepolitics.com takes on that issue today in a column:

In the United States, the FBI tracks annual statistics on police officer slayings as well as assaults on police officers. I compared these figures to the various release dates for the three major GTA console game releases to date (GTA III, GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas) and plotted the whole thing on the chart below. It’s a bit like the well-known video games vis-a-vis juvenile crime graph created by Duke Ferris of GameRevolution a few years back, although with a much narrower focus.The FBI statistics portray a much different picture than that painted by critics like Thompson and Grossman. In the chart, I’ve plotted FBI figures for police officers feloniously killed (blue line) and police officers assaulted (red line, listed in thousands). As can be seen, police officer murders peaked at 70 in 1997 (i.e., four years before GTA III) and again in 2001. GTA III was released in late October that year, so if the game caused that year’s spike, it would have had only two months in which to do so. (also, the 2001 figures don’t count the 72 officers lost when the World Trade Centers collapsed). The chart shows that since GTA III was released police killings have been trending downward to a low of 48 in 2006. Although the FBI has not yet posted 2007 numbers, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund lists 68 police officers as having been shot to death in 2007. But it’s worth pointing out that while there may have been a spike in police slayings last year, there was no corresponding GTA release. There hasn’t been a new Grand Theft Auto console title issued since San Andreas in October, 2004.

I’ve commented more on these issues in my essay on “Why hasn’t violent media turned us into a nation of killers?”