Getting the Digits

• Apr 17th, 2009
• Posted by Ron Schott
• Posted in Count von Count, Facebook, News, Social Media, Twitter, YouTube

The world (we’re talking the normal adopters here, not early adopters) is finally seeing the writing on the wall: social media isn’t going away. The thing about the rest of the world is this: they love numbers. And we’re not talking about just liking numbers:  they love numbers.  So naturally, those in the know are starting to pump out some increasingly astonishing numbers about the social media space.

In keeping with that trend, here are some of the numbers that jumped out at us in the past week:

100 million – Monthly viewers for YouTube in the month of March. That’s a lot of people watching meaningful videos.

2:1 – The near-equivalent ratio of YouTube to Hulu. At their current growth rates, YouTube is growing at a pace that puts it doubling the size of Hulu.

8  – The time, in months, it’s taken Facebook to grow from 100 to 200 million users. That’s more users than the population of Brazil.

13 billion – The difference between the low and high estimates of Facebook’s valuation. Currently they’re sitting at anywhere between 2 and 15 billion dollars. Maybe the fact that financial companies are throwing around 13 billion dollar swings has something to do with our current economic state?

66.8 - The percentage of people who said they use social networks, according to a Nielsen Online poll.

65.1 – The percentage of people who said they used email in that same Nielson poll.

1,053,237 - Number of followers actor/director/executive producer/boytoy/? Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) had as of 1:45 PST, April 17, 2009.

3 – People who care that he was the first to reach this number (Ashton and Demi kind of care, and we’re assuming that Larry King is a little bummed out).

1 – Charity that has benefitted from this whole affair. 

Some interesting European numbers from recent 77Lab study (remember to do the conversions):

9 – Hours per week spent on the internet.

31 – Percent difference for internet penetration in Nordic countries (76%) compared to Southern Europe (45%). They’re all shopping for furniture that isn’t IKEA.

2010 – Estimated year internet consumption will overtake that of television. Also, weirdly enough, it’s the same year that people will realize the Real World is no longer entertaining.

50 - Estimated percentage of time spent on the internet using a PC in five years. Who’s buying stock in UMPC and MID companies?