OnlyFans has 85 million subscribers & 1 million creators

 "The site, which has boomed in popularity in the past year, is technically open to anyone – from personal trainers to artists and cooks – but it’s best known for one thing: nudes. Creators charge subscription fees for exclusive content, put up pay-per-view posts, and generate income from tips and livestreams.

A spokeswoman for OnlyFans told Guardian Australia there are more than 1 million creators worldwide, 85 million registered users, and it paid out more than US$2bn ($2.7bn) globally this year."

[...]

"Use of OnlyFans exploded during the pandemic, going from 7.5 million users last November to 85 million now."

Source:  The Guardian, 22nd December 2020

Visitors spend approx 35% more time with pages that use Google AMP

"Chartbeat says visitors to web pages that load with Google AMP are spending 35 percent more time with that content on average than with standard mobile web pages.
On average, visitors spend 48.2 seconds with pages found through Google search that load with AMP, compared to 35.6 seconds on average with standard mobile pages found through search.
That means pages that load with accelerated mobile pages software (that’s what AMP stands for) are more valuable to advertisers, because visitors that spend more time with content spend more time scrolling through ads."

Source:  Recode, 5th June 2017

60% of the Guardian's Google mobile traffic is from AMP

"Many publishers have scrambled to adopt AMP, Google’s answer to Facebook Instant Articles. As the Guardian’s experience showed, Accelerated Mobile Pages can be a success if publishers put the work in.
AMP has gradually been taking over the Guardian’s mobile traffic; today, 60 percent of its Google mobile traffic is AMP, well above the 10 to 15 percent that publishers have been getting from AMP, according to a recent estimate by SEO consulting company Define Media.
AMP pages are 2 percent more likely to be clicked on and clickthrough rates on AMP pages to non-AMP pages is 8.6 percent higher than they are on regular mobile pages, according to Natalia Baltazar, a developer for the British newspaper, who presented at AMP Conf, a two-day conference hosted by Google taking place in New York City March 7-8."

Source:  Digiday, 8th March 2017

33% of Buzzfeed's traffic comes from Facebook & 21% from Snapchat

"For starters, don’t think of BuzzFeed as a publisher of a single website that has great social media chops. It’s a “fully integrated social platform” whose Snapchat and Instagram channels are as important as — if not more important than — its natively hosted stuff. Want proof? Peretti read aloud BuzzFeed’s traffic proportions on the show:
23 percent: Direct to the site or apps
14 percent: YouTube views
2 percent: Google search to the site
6 percent: Facebook traffic to the site
27 percent: Facebook native video
4 percent: Images on Facebook
21 percent: Snapchat content views
3 percent: Other distributed platforms"

Source:  ReCode, 16th September 2015

YouTube 'breaks even on revenues of $4bn a year'

"Google Inc. nurtured YouTube into a cultural phenomenon, attracting more than one billion users each month. Still, YouTube hasn’t become a profitable business.
The online-video unit posted revenue of about $4 billion in 2014, up from $3 billion a year earlier, according to two people familiar with its financials, as advertiser-friendly moves enticed some big brands to spend more. But while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year, it didn’t contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even,” according to a person with knowledge of the figure.
By comparison, Facebook Inc. generated more than $12 billion in revenue, and nearly $3 billion in profit, from its 1.3 billion users last year."

Source:  WSJ, 25th February 2015

'The Dress' generated record traffic figures for Buzzfeed

"After the furor over the escaped llamas died down late yesterday afternoon, BuzzFeed posted a very BuzzFeed post that aggregated a Tumblr post of a dress in which the color of the dress was in dispute. Basically, some people saw white and gold (it’s white and gold) and other saw black and blue (it’s not). It was the apotheosis of viral content. To use a technical term, the Internet lost its collective shit. The post was shared 16 million times just five-odd hours after it was posted, and BuzzFeed said a record 670,000 people were on the site at the same time. Neetzan Zimmerman, who the WSJ once panted had “cracked the code” of viral, treated it as a solemn moment."

Source:  Digiday, 26th February 2015
Update - 38m views on 2nd March, 4 days after posting

MySpace has 50m visitors a month

"Did you know that 50 million people still visit MySpace each month?
Would you be surprised that MySpace users generated over 300 million video views in November, good enough for 16th place on comScore’s Video Metrix ranking?
Were you not sure that MySpace still existed?
Well, the social networking site that put the very concept of social networking on the map is alive and well. It’s been nearly a decade since News Corp acquired the company for $580 million and roughly three and a half years since the media company sold the fading property for $35 million to the Internet ad company Specific Media. (News Corp publishes The Wall Street Journal.)"
Source:  WSJ, 14th January 2015

Mobile accounts for nearly 2/3 of AutoTrader's traffic

"Auto Trader found that that the tipping point came twenty months earlier than anticipated, with market research director Nick King saying that car buyers are “blazing a trail in the use of mobile devices.”
“Nearly seven in every ten full-page advertisement views were made on tablet or mobile last month,” said King. “That should be a rallying cry for dealers who question the value of optimising their websites for mobile devices.”
Latest figures from June 2014 reveal that mobile use now accounts for nearly two thirds of Auto Trader traffic, up 21 per cent year-on-year. 63 per cent of searches have now gone mobile (20 per cent on tablet and 43 per cent for mobile devices) compared with 37 per cent for PC."
Source:  The Drum, 7th July 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)

More than 1 million Pinterest 'pins' are made in the UK each day

"Pinterest claims more than one million Pinterst posts are made in the UK each day, with more than 60% of monthly users visiting the site weekly."
Source:  Marketing Magazine, 9th September 2013

Buzzfeed has 85 milion monthly visitors and is profitable

"BuzzFeed reached record traffic of 85 million unique visitors in August. We are 3X bigger than we were just one year ago, 8X bigger than we were two years ago, and we have served more web pages so far in 2013 than we have in the entire previous five year history of the company. By this time next year we should be one of the biggest sites on the web.
[...]
Part of our strategy is being a great business. This sounds strange as a strategic goal, isn’t that obvious? But we are in a market where many traditional publishers are run at a loss by wealthy families and many high profile venture-backed startups generate no or little revenue. Surprisingly it is contrarian that we are running BuzzFeed as a profitable business. Jon’s incredible success turning BuzzFeed into a great business in just three years has been the reason why we've been able to hire so many other talented new people. So don’t forget to thank Jon for your job if you joined BuzzFeed within the last 3 years. ;)"

Source:  Memo from Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti, 4th September 2013

Airbnb got 30% more engagement by changing from an icon from a star to a heart

"For a couple years, registered Airbnb users have been able to star the properties they browse, and save them to a list. But Gebbia’s team wondered whether just a few tweaks here and there could change engagement, so they changed that star to a heart. To their surprise, engagement went up by a whopping 30%. The star, they realized, was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn’t carry much weight. The heart, by contrast, was aspirational. "It showed us the potential for something bigger," Gebbia tells Co.Design. And in particular, it made them think about the subtle limitations of having a search-based service. "You have to have search," Gebbia says. "But what if you don’t know where you want to go?""
Source:  Fast Code Design, October 2012

Mobile devices account for 30% of FT.com's traffic

"The FT’s total paid circulation was more than 602,000 across print and online, modestly up on 2011, with digital subscriptions exceeding print circulation for the first time. Digital subscriptions increased 18% to almost 316,000.
Mobile devices now account for 30% of FT.com traffic and 15% of new subscriptions. FT Web App now has 3.5 million users."

Source:  Financial results from the Financial Times, February 2013

Whitney Houston's death led to her Wikipedia article receiving 425 views per second

"On February 12, 2012, news of Whitney Houston's death brought 425 hits per second to her Wikipedia article, the highest peak traffic on any article since at least January 2010.
It is broadly known that Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website on the Internet, but the English Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles and 29 million total pages. Much less attention has been given to traffic patterns and trends in content viewed. The Wikimedia Foundation makes available aggregate raw article view data for all of its projects.
This article attempts to convey some of the fascinating phenomena that underlie extremely popular articles, and perhaps more importantly to editors, discusses how this information can be used to improve the project moving forward. While some dismiss view spikes as the manifestation of shallow pop culture interests (e.g., Justin Bieber is the 6th most popular article over the past 3 years, see Tab. 2), these are valuable opportunities to study reader behavior and to shape the public perception of our projects."

Source:  Wikipedia Report, 4th February 2013

Half of Facebook & Twitter's US visitors come via mobile devices

Click to enlarge

Source:  Press release from comScore, 29th November 2012
Note 1 - Mobile includes tablets
Note 2 - This is mobile web access. not via apps

Popular websites are using more cookies

"The number of third-party cookies -- little pieces of software set on users' machines to track web users for ad targeting or site analytics purposes -- rose from 1,887 on the home pages of the most-popular 100 websites [in the US] in May to 2,324 in October, according to research from the University of California at Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. That's a 23% leap.
The Center's Web Privacy Census, conduced each year, crawled the most-trafficked sites on October 24, measuring the number of first-party and third-party cookies spotted on the top 100, top 1,000 and top 25,000 sites. In addition to checking website home pages, which it calls a "shallow crawl," the census project conducted "deep crawls," checking up to six random links on the same sites.
The privacy census measured the top sites as reported by Quantcast. According to the Quantcast site, the top 10 U.S. sites are Google, YouTube, Facebook, MSN, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia, Microsoft.com and Huffington Post. Others in the top 100 include Weather.com, eBay, ToysRUs.com, Walmart.com, IMDB, WebMD, Politico, Flickr, BuzzFeed, BarackObama.com and Time.com."

Source:  AdAge, 27th November 2012

2/3 of Facebook business pages are inactive or incomplete

"Pages attract business users to Facebook and lead the social network’s efforts to earn advertising revenues. However, this study of 5.7 million Facebook Pages shows that business users are still struggling to adapt to Facebook as an engagement opportunity. The study updates the findings of a similar research conducted by Recommend.ly in March 2012.
The current study discovered low levels of active Pages, fall in average number of posts and a huge drop in engagement rates since March. Page owners clearly need to do more to make Facebook work for them.
The study also found that the share of visual content on Pages has increased after the introduction of Timeline view for Pages. Also, it is found that Pages selecting specific category names such as ‘Spa’ or ‘Restaurant’ tend to be more focused and get better engagement from fans, compared to Pages choosing generic sounding category names such as ‘Local Business’.
Key Findings
About 2 out 3 Facebook Pages are inactive in some way:
63.9 per cent Pages have no cover photo
70.1 per cent Pages make 0 posts a month
83.4 per cent Pages never participated in conversations
50 per cent Pages have less than 300 fans"
Source: Research by Recommend.ly, reported in a blog post, 21st November 2012

Amazon's S3 hosting service stores over one trillion objects

"Late last week the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 reached one trillion (1,000,000,000,000 or 1012). That's 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our Galaxy. If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.
We knew this day was coming! Lately, we've seen the object count grow by up to 3.5 billion objects in a single day (that's over 40,000 new objects per second)."

Source:  Amazon S3 blog, 12th June 2012

Note - Not entirely sure what constitutes an 'object' but presumably a picture is one object, and a piece of text (but I'd guess it's more than a character of text)

Here's a definition

Three quarters of the UK's top 100 youth brands have a mobile app

"Last month, The Beans Group released its list of the Top 100 Youth Brands, a report based on a survey of 1,000 students in the UK looking at which brands are most popular among 18-24 year-olds.
Given that the youth market is often one brands try to target on mobile – younger consumers have traditionally led adoption of mobile technology; nearly half of 18-24s have made fashion purchases on a smartphone; and as The Beans Group points out in its report, they're a socially influential group – it seemed a perfect fit. So we investigated what each of the 100 brands is doing on mobile: whether they have a mobile-optimised site, an app, or multiple apps, and what platforms they're available on.
We found that only 53 of the brands' main websites are mobile-optimised – with Apple, Sky, BT, Visa, Sony and WHSmith being among the huge brands without an optimised site.
[...]
76 of the brands have an iOS or Android app in some form – meaning nearly a quarter of them still don't, many of which are the same brands which lack a mobile site.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the brands' app portfolio included an iPhone offering. Of the 76 brands with apps, only three didn't include an iPhone app – Doritos and MAC Cosmetics, which only have Android apps in the UK, and Lush Cosmetics, whose only app offering is an iPad version of its customer magazine."

Source:  Mobile Marketing Magazine, 8th November 2012

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