70% of brands have influencer Programmes on Instagram

Source:  Data from L2, reported in a blog post, 2nd October 2017
The top 3 categories are Luxury, Activewear and Beauty.

Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show in 2016

Source:  Data from Torrentfreak, reported by Advanced Television, 3rd January 2017
Note - It's interesting that there are no Netflix shows on the list, possibly because Netflix releases shows simultaneously around the world

Mid-tier bloggers 'can charge up to $2,500 for a blog post'

"According to multiple sources, mid-tier bloggers can charge up to $2,500 for one blog post, plus corresponding social media conversation. The average fee, however, probably ranges closer to between $400 and $1000, depending on the breadth, scope and content. Even those with just 10,000 followers can find ways to monetize. “We try not to let bloggers take less than $200 per post, even if they’re small,” said Nazarudin, whose BloggerBabes network helps broker deals between brands and bloggers. Two hundred dollars might not sound like a lot, but if a blogger is publishing two to three sponsored posts a week, as many are, even on the low-end of the spectrum, it can quickly add up. And certainly, there is no shortage of opportunities for motivated bloggers to partner with brands."
Source:  Racked, 23rd May 2016
Note - 'Mid-tier' is defined elsewhere in the article as
"a social following of 50,000 and your content is great and your readership is loyal"

The Internet in Real Time 2014

An incredibly useful site from WebPageFX, showing the key metrics for key sites and services.  Often these things are out of date, but this one seems to be bang on, as at December 2014.
File under 'essential resources!
See it here

Sites and services covered include:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Instagram
Foursquare
Pinterest
Tinder
WhatsApp
Snapchat
Skype
Amazon
Google
Kickstarter
Yelp
Email
Dropbox
Wordpress
Tumblr
Flickr
reddit
Android
iOS
Youtube
Netflix
Spotify
Pandora

Yahoo & Tumblr together have 1bn MAUs, 550m on mobile

Correction to last tweet: Yahoo + Tumblr over 1 bln monthly actives, 550 million mobile (Not just Tumblr)
— Doug MacMillan (@dmac1) October 21, 2014

Note - Original tweet that he is correcting
Note - Doug MacMillan is a tech reporteer for WSJ

More than three quarters of online American teens use Facebook

"Ever since Facebook CFO David Ebersman admitted last October that young teens were visiting the site slightly less frequently, most have accepted as fact that young people are fleeing Facebook en masse. Ivy League researchers have forecast that the service will be all but dead by 2017; President Obama recently claimed that young people “don’t use Facebook anymore”; and when comScore recently reported that fewer college students were using Facebook, media outlets ran stories on the “social platforms college kids now prefer.”
But if you take a closer look at the data it tells a very different story. Sure, many data sources show that Facebook’s usage among young people has declined slightly — but the drops are small, and the huge majority of this audience still uses the site. For instance, that comScore report only found a three-percentage-point drop in college-aged adults’ Facebook usage and reported that 89% of this audience still used Facebook — far more than used any other social site.
To investigate teens’ social behaviors further, we recently asked 4,517 US online youth (aged 12 to 17) not just whether they use social sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr — but if they use those sites “about once a day,” “at least a few times each day,” or even if they were on any of the sites “all the time.”
The results were clear: Facebook remains young users’ favorite social network. More than three-quarters of online youth use Facebook — twice as many as use Pinterest or Tumblr or Snapchat, and more than use Instagram and WhatApp combined. And 28% of young users who are on Facebook say they use it “all the time,” a higher percentage than said this about any other social network."

Source:  Blog post by Forrester's Nate Elliott, 24th June 2014

Reddit had 731m unique visitors and 56bn page views in 2013

"2013 Overall reddit Stats (approximate)
56 billion page views
731 million Unique Visitors
An Average Visit Duration of 15 min 55 sec
40,855,032 posts
404,603,286 comments
3,676,091,578 comment votes
3,037,413,635 link votes
6.7 billion total votes

Top Ten Countries by Unique Visitors (monthly)
1. United States 48,533,932
2. Canada 7,415,650
3. United Kingdom 6,164,527
4. Australia 2,847,846
5. Germany 2,143,252
6. Japan 1,015,365
7. Sweden 988,575
8. Netherlands 940,352
9. France 892,128
10. Brazil 811,757"

Source:  Reddit blog, 31st December 2013
(Lots more stats listed in the blog post)

There were 14.5m views of the Doctor Who tumblr on the day of the Day of The Doctor broadcast

""Doctor Who" marked its 50th anniversary over the weekend by setting a few ratings records.
"Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor" -- the official semicentennial special of the cult British sci-fi series -- rounded up 3.6 million total Whovians on Saturday, according to Nielsen.
That included 2.4 million viewers for the daytime airing of the much-anticipated special, which was beamed live to 94 countries around the world to avoid spoilers. That was a best-ever rating for BBC America, which carries "Doctor Who" in the U.S.
The rest of the U.S. audience came from a repeat on BBC America during Saturday prime time.
As befitting its status as a cult favorite, "Doctor Who" also burned up social media over the weekend.
There were 14.5 million views of "Doctor Who's" Tumblr on Saturday, more than for any other televised event, including the Super Bowl and the MTV Video Music Awards.
But the American ratings paled beside those in the U.K., where "Doctor Who" is an institution. The BBC said that 10.6 million Britons watched the program."

Source:  LA Times, 25th November 2013

Note - This is the official Doctor Who tumblr

Tumblr hosts 100 million blogs

"Tumblr has today quietly ticked over the 100 million blog mark, with those blogs containing some 44.6 billion posts. We noticed that the ticker on the popular blogging platform’s about page had ticked over and Tumblr confirmed with us that this milestone was reached today.
This marks significant growth over the last year, of somewhere around 50 million blogs since April of 2012, when it crossed 50 million for the first time. The last reported number of blogs was 93 million as of March 2, 2013, so the pace is still accelerating, with 6 million being created in the last month or so alone."

Source:  The Next Web, 26th March 2013

The demographics of American Tumblr users

Click to enlarge

Source:  Pew Internet & American Life Project, 14th February 2013

Instant messaging is more popular than search in China

Click to enlarge

Source:  CNNIC via Marbridge Daily, 15th January 2013

Tumblr hosts more than 80 million blogs

"The five-year-old micro-blogging platform, which allows users to post images and video, has signed up We Are Social, Poke, AKQA and Bartle Bogle Hegarty as its first UK agency partners.
The partnership will give them access to Tumblr data and specialist training in a similar manner to Facebook’s Preferred Developer programme. It has signed up 12 agencies globally.
Tumblr, which receives 16.8bn page views monthly and hosts 80.5m blogs, does not have a UK operation. The agency tie-ups are intended to help them better use the platform for clients and boost creativity.
Foster’s, Topshop and Pringle of Scotland are among the few UK brands using Tumblr to post content, with many preferring Facebook and Twitter for their social-media advertising and brand building."

Source:  Marketing Week, 13th November 2012

Nearly 70% of China's internet users have a microblog account

"According to figures released today by the Data Center of the Chinese Internet (DCCI), nearly 70% of China's internet users have unique microblog accounts. 88.8% of Chinese internet users aged 19 or above have microblog accounts, and growth continues steadily."

Source:  Sina Tech, via Marbridge Daily, 26th July 2012

Note - while I've used 'Twitter' as a tag for the post, Sina Weibo is the most popular microblog in China.

More on Sina Weibo here

Tumblr has 17.5 billion page views a month

"Karp likes to talk about Tumblr less as a business than as a “platform for creativity.” And indeed, it has been used to make more than 60 million blogs — among them a visual scrapbook kept by Michael Stipe; silly meme-blogs like Hey Girl, It’s Paul Ryan; and the clever graphic analysis that became the recent book “I Love Charts” — drawing a combined 17.5 billion page views a month."

Source:  New York Times, 12th July 2012

Facebook has 80% reach on smartphones in the US

Click to enlarge

Source:  Press release from comScore, 7th May 2012

Tumblr gets 15bn page views a month

"At the Digitial Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich, Germany, Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp announced that the blogging site now reaches 120 million people and 15 billion pageviews every month.
According to The Next Web, Karp credited the site’s sociability for its growth. The average Tumblr blog is re-blogged nine times, said the founder, and the content is distributed through RSS, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platforms.
“There’s the spreadable future of social media,”  quipped journalist and professor Jeff Jarvis on Twitter.
That adds up to 560 million people who have viewed content on Tumblr to date. There are 249 million visitors in the U.S. alone, comprising 45% of Tumblr’s audience. Next in line are Brazil with 49 million visits and the UK with 34 million visits."

Source:  SocialTimes, 23rd January 2012

Sina Weibo saw a record of over 32,000 'Tweets' per second during Chinese New Year

"Sina Weibo, China’s cult Twitter alternative, broke its record for the average number of tweets per second during Chinese New Year last night, beating even Twitter’s own best. According to a report from Do News, the microblogging service saw an average of 32,312 messages sent per second, as an astonishing 481,207 messages were sent during the first minute of the new year.
What’s particularly impressive is that the figure is greater than the highest volume of messages ever recorded on Twitter – 25,088 per second — which was hit when Japanese users took to the service during a national broadcast of popular Anime series Castle in the Sky in December."

Source:  TheNextWeb, 23rd January 2012

Chinese microblogging platform Weibo has 250m users

"Chinese internet company Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) has announced in its Q3 2011 earnings call that users on its Weibo microblogging platform exceeded 227 mln as of the end of September and recently reached 250 mln. Investment in marketing and R&D for Weibo more than doubled compared to Q3 2010, and CEO and president Charles Chao said costs will continue to rise over the next few quarters as Sina invests further in the platform.
As of the end of September, average daily posts rose from 75 mln to 86 mln, up 15% YoY. Overall traffic to the platform rose 23% YoY."

Source:  China News, Via Marbridge Daily, 9th November 2011

Social media use by Fortune 500 companies - 62% use Twitter, 58% Facebook, and 23% have a blog

"A recent study from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth has found the adoption of social media usage among Fortune 500 companies has levelled off. Across multiple industries, usage of Twitter, Facebook and blogs in 2011 is level with or below that of 2010.
In 2010, 23 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a blog. In 2011, that figured remained unchanged at 23 percent. In 2010, 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a Twitter account. In 2011, 62 percent have an account. In 2010, 56 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a Facebook account. In 2011, 58 percent have an account."

Source:  Data from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, reported by Adrants, 2nd November 2011

Over 70m Americans accessed social sites or blogs via mobile in August 2011

"comScore, Inc, a leader in measuring the digital world, today released results of a study on mobile social media usage based on data from its comScore MobiLens service, which showed that 72.2 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device in August 2011, an increase of 37 percent in the past year. The study also provided new insights into how mobile users interact with social media, finding that more than half read a post from an organization, brand or event while on their mobile device.
“Social media is one of the most popular and fastest growing mobile activities, reaching nearly one third of all U.S. mobile users,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president for mobile. “This behavior is even more prevalent among smartphone owners with three in five accessing social media each month, highlighting the importance of apps and the enhanced functionality of smartphones to social media usage on mobile devices.”
In August 2011, more than 72.2 million people accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device, an increase of 37 percent from the previous year. Nearly 40 million U.S. mobile users, more than half of the mobile social media audience, access these sites almost every day, demonstrating the importance of this activity to people’s daily routines.
Research also indicated that although more people accessed these sites via their mobile browser, the social networking app audience grew five times faster in the past year. While the mobile browsing social networking audience grew 24 percent to 42.3 million users in the past year, the mobile social networking app audience surged 126 percent to 38.5 million."

Source:  Press release from comScore, 20th October 2011