The Huffington Post site now has more unique visitors than the Washington Post site

"In news that shows another seismic shift in the media landscape - this time online - the Huffington Post passed Washingtonpost.com in unique visitors in September, according to new data made available by Nielsen Online (via EditorandPublisher.com). Additional data about online news sites from the rankings:
The Huffington Post was up 26% year-over-year with 9.4 million uniques while the audience at Washingtonpost.com dropped nearly 30% to 9.2 million. HuffPo was not far behind USAToday.com, which had 9.9 million uniques.
Yahoo News (42.6 million uniques), CNN (38.2 million uniques), MSNBC (36.5 million uniques), AOL News (25.7 million uniques), and NYTimes.com topped the September list, with Huff Post at #15 and Washingtonpost.com at #16.
NYTimes.com expanded its audience by 7% to 21.5 million uniques in September, after several months of losses. The Examiner group of newspapers had the highest rate of growth in September, up 373% to 6.4 million uniques.
Nielsen warned, however, that year-over-year comparisons for these news sites should be viewed with caution. Since June, the company expanded its panel by eight times its previous number. Additionally, news events can often alter site audiences during a particular time period. Nielsen said this trending could affect some sites and should only be used directionally."
Source: Nielsen Online, reported by MarketingVox, 19th October 2009

There were nearly 10 million live streams of U2's concert on YouTube

"YouTube's live webcast of U2's "360" concert at the Rose Bowl on Sunday generated nearly 10 million streams across the globe, making it the single-largest streaming event in the Internet vid giant's five-year history.
"This was a big win for the YouTube community," said Chris Maxcy, YouTube's head of music partnerships.
The full-length concert vid, which runs nearly 2 1/2 hours, has since drawn more than 1 million views after three days on YouTube."
Source: Variety, 28th October 2009

83% of Tivo users who watched an episode of Mad Men that they had recorded fast forwarded through the commercials

"AMC's Mad Men saw 83% of its timeshifted audience fast-forward through its commercials, compared to a genre benchmark of 73%. Comedy Central's South Park similarly showed fast-forwarding of 66% compared to genre average of 55%.
NBC's 30 Rock and sitcoms in general were the exception with only 64% fast-forwarding compared to a genre average of 66%."
Source: TiVo press release, 23rd September 2009

Over 5 billion tweets have been posted

"The microblogging site only reached its one billionth Tweet last November, and was only up to 1.6 billion in April. The remaining 3.4 billion Tweets have been sent in just six months, suggesting massive growth in the use of the site.
There is some debate over whether the @robinsloan Tweet – which he is calling the “pentagigatweet” – is really the five billionth.
The number of a Tweet is displayed in its web address or URL. @robinsloan’s Tweet is at the URL twitter.com/robinsloan/status/5000000000 , or five billion.
However, Twitter has changed its numbering system on more than one occasion. It is not clear that Tweet 5,000,000,000 would have the exact URL number 5000000000.
What is definite, however, is that the five billion mark has been passed.
A third-party site called GigaTweet has been counting all Tweets for some time now. Its count at the time of writing had just passed 5,018,584,000, although it is going up by around 300 a second."
Source: Daily Telegraph, 20th October 2009

There are 1.4 million business pages on Facebook, with an average of 100 fans each

"Facebook doesn't break out figures for small businesses but says it has 1.4 million business "pages," with an average of 100 fans per page. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a speech in New York last month that every day, 10 million people become fans of pages. (Many of those pages are for random concepts, such as the beach, or laughter, or even one called "I don't sleep enough because I stay up late for no reason," which has 3.5 million fans.)"
Source: LA Times, 27th October 2009

18% of Japanese company Rakuten's Q1 2009 eCommerce revenues came from mobile

Click to enlarge

Source: Page 50 of Economy + Internet Trends, Morgan Stanley, 20th October 2009
(The whole presentation is brilliant, but particularly the second half, which focusses on Mobile)

Over 20% of US mobile advertising clicks end up at either iTunes of the iPhone App store

"In terms of engagement, Apple’s App Store and iTunes made up 22% of post-click actions- a 6% increase month over month representing the largest increase in September, while “traffic to site” was the primary destination for campaigns in Q3 and represented the destination for approximately 52% of campaigns on average. Sending consumers to mobile Websites and mobile apps remain the most popular campaign outcomes according to the report."
Source: Millennial Media's SMART Report for September 2009, reported by Mobile Marketing Watch, 16th October 2009
See the full SMART report here

YouTube is monetising one billion videos a week

" YouTube is now monetizing over a billion video views a week. Last week, YouTube announced that it was serving over 1 billion video views a day, so if you do the math there, it means that YouTube is monetizing one every seven video views.
The company also noted that 90% of the top 50 advertisers according to AdAge have now run ads on YouTube. And of its homepage ad inventory, 90% of it sold out for the quarter in the U.S., with lower, but still impressive sale rates for the rest of the world. Google also noted that YouTube was just starting to unleash its pre-roll inventory and let its salesforce have a go at selling that to advertisers, which should bring in more money."
Source: Data reported by Google in a thrid quarter earnings call, reported by Techcrunch, 15th October 2009

Nokia's Comes With Music service has 107,000 subscribers worldwide

"CWM ACTIVE VOUCHERS– JULY 2009
UK – 32,728 (launch date: Oct 08)
Singapore – 19,318 (Feb 09)
Australia – 23,003 (Mar 09)
Brazil – 10,809 (Apr 09)
Sweden – 1,101 (Apr 09)
Italy – 691 (Apr 09)
Mexico – 16,344 (May 09)
Germany – 2,673 (May 09)
Switzerland – 560 (Jun 09)"
Source: Musically, 16th October 2009

Google accounts for 6% of al internet traffic globally

"Five years ago, Internet traffic was, for the most part, managed by tier 1 providers like AT&T, Verizon, Level 3 Communications, and Global Crossing, all of which connected to thousands of tier 2 networks and regional providers. Today, that has changed. Now, instead of traffic being distributed among tens of thousands of networks, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic. Among these new Internet superpowers, it's no surprise to find Google listed. In fact, the search giant accounts for the largest source (6%) of all Internet traffic worldwide.
This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990's."
Source: Arbor Networks report, cited by the New York Times, 13th October 2009
Note - In the original press release here it says that 30 large companies make up 30% of the traffic, and mentions Google and YouTube individually, so this 6% presumably refers to Google entities, and not owned services like YouTube and Blogger

Shazam, the music identification service, has been used by over 50 million people worldwide

"Shazam, the world's leading mobile music discovery provider, today announced that more than 50 million people around the world have used the Shazam service, an increase of 15 million users since February of this year. The phenomenal milestone signifies just how popular the music discovery service has become which is now live in more than 150 countries. "
Source: Shazam press release, 14th October 2009

4 billion photos have been uploaded to Flickr

"On Saturday [10th October 2009], photo number four billion was uploaded to photo sharing site Flickr. This comes just five and a half months after the 3 billionth and nearly 18 months after photo number two billion.
As impressive as four billion photos is, that figure is trounced by Facebook, which reported more than 15 billion photos in its database back in April and currently adds two billion more photos each month."
Source: Mashable, 12th October 2009
(& this is the 4 billionth photo)

The domain name and assets of Insure.com were sold for $16m

"Insure.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: NSUR)announced today that it has sold its Insure.com brand name and related mediaassets for $16 million in cash to QuinStreet, Inc. Insure.com, Inc. (the
Company) intends to change its corporate name to Life Quotes, Inc. and will continue its business under its Life Quotes and Consumer Insurance Guide brand names. The Company will retain all of its remaining balance sheet assets, national brokerage contracts with 25 leading life insurance companies, 50 fully licensed insurance agents, call center operations, customer and prospect lists, and nearly all of its current inbound affiliate and traffic
partnerships.
The Company acquired the Insure.com name and website for $1.6 million in December 2001."
Source: Reuters, 9th October 2009

250,000 - 300,000 live online streams of the England Vs. Ukraine football match were served

"Before the match, Perform had said it would cap the number of streams at one million to preserve the quality of the picture. The actual number of pay-per-view "buys", from £4.99 to £11.99, can be estimated at 250,000‑300,000, although a proportion of those were through a marketing tie-up with the online bookmaker Bet365, which showed the game free to customers with a funded account.
If Sky had shown the game, it might have expected around two million viewers and had it been broadcast on ITV, the audience would probably have peaked at around seven million. Kentaro refused to release a detailed breakdown, claiming the figures are commercially sensitive, so it is impossible to assess how many viewers arrived via newspaper websites and other media partners signed up to promote the match on a revenue-share basis."
Source: The Guardian, 12th October 2009

1.4 billion texts are sent daily in the US in 2009, twice as many as in 2008

"Some 740 billion text messages were sent in the first half of 2009 in the U.S. This according to the CTIA’s semiannual wireless industry survey, which helpfully breaks down that astonishing figure to an even more astonishing 4.1 billion texts per day. That’s about double the number sent during the same period last year. And keep in mind, we’re only talking about the United States here, not the rest of the world."
Source: CITA Wireless Industry Survey, reported by Digital Daily, 8th October 2009

YouTube now serves more than 1 billion video views a day

"Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you."
Source: YouTube founder Chad Hurley, writing on the YouTube blog, 9th October 2009

US mobile content provider SendMe makes revenues of $10m per month

"Thanks to its subscriber base of more than 1 million youngsters, mainly in their early teens, who pay an average of $9.99 a month, SendMeMobile is making $10 million a month in revenue and has reached profitability. And since sales are rising, it's not a stretch to expect the company to end the year in the range of about $150 million annually.
The company is just three years old. And unlike almost all Silicon Valley companies, SendMe started generating tens of thousands of dollars in revenue the day it launched, stunning investors. It's raised $35 million to date from True Ventures and Spark Capital, and doesn't expect to raise more—ever."
Source: BusinessWeek, 13th July 2009

The UK exports more TV formats than any other country

"Formats like “Deal or No Deal”, “Hole in the Wall” and “Lalola” travel around the world inspiring millions of people. 445 original formats found their way to foreign countries from 2006 to 2008. The number nearly doubled from the first report made on behalf of FRAPA, which analysed the formats traded from 2002 to 2004.
The production volume generated by traded formats has grown to €9.3 billion for the years 2006 to 2008. This is an enormous increase of 45 % in comparison to the first report. The UK still leads in the number of exported formats, followed by the USA, The Netherlands and Argentina."
Source: Press release for The Format Recognition and Protection Association (FRAPA), 6th October 2009

Only one in four registered twitter users is tweeting in any given month

"We know that Twitter has 50 million registered users, but we also know that the vast majority of them have tweeted fewer than ten times. Let's investigate just how many of these registered users are actually actively tweeting.
Using our tweet data, we can identify what percent of the user base sent out at least one tweet in any given month.
[...]
The number seems to hover in the 25% range. In other words, only about 1 in 4 registered users is actually tweeting in any given month. (Although it's worth noting that some users may only be using Twitter to read others' tweets, meaning they are not full-fledged "zombie" accounts.)"
Source: Robert J Moore of RJMetrics, writing in Techcrunch, 5th October 2009, using analysis of 85,000 users and 3 million tweets.
Other stats quoted:
"Twitter's user growth is no longer accelerating. The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per month.
Over 14% of users don't have a single follower, and over 75% of users have 10 or fewer followers.
38% of users have never sent a single tweet, and over 75% of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets.
Once a user has tweeted once, there is a 65% chance that they will tweet again. After that second tweet, however, the chance of a third tweet goes up to 81%.
If someone is still tweeting in their second week as a user, it is extremely likely that they will remain on Twitter as a long-term user.
Users who joined in more recent months are less likely to stop using the service and more likely to tweet more often than users from the past."

US online ad spend breakdown: Search 47%, Display 34%, Classified 10%, Other 8%

Click to expand

Source: Press release reporting data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), 5th October 2009

American online ad spend was 5% lower in the first half of 2009 than in the first half of 2008

"U.S. Internet advertising revenues [in the first half of 2009] were at $10.9 billion in that period, a 5.3% decline from the same period in 2008.
Search and display-related advertising continue to represent the largest percentages of overall interactive advertising spend. Search revenues amounted to more than $5.1 billion for the first six months of 2009, up slightly from that same period in 2008. Display-related advertising—which includes display ads, rich media, digital video and sponsorship—totaled nearly $3.8 billion in the first six months of 2009, showing a relatively modest 1.1% decline from the same period in 2008. Digital video continues to experience robust growth with a 38% increase from the first half of 2008."
Source: Press release reporting data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), 5th October 2009

44% of American digital video recorder (DVR) owners record five or fewer programs per week

"65% of DVR owners, and 54% of digital cable VOD users, agree (8-10 on a 10 point scale) that they usually watch recorded DVR or on-Demand programs when there is nothing on regularly scheduled TV that they want to watch
In households that have both a DVR and are VOD users, 57% start by watching live TV -- in households that just have a DVR, 68% start with live TV
44% of DVR owners record five or fewer programs per week
85% would recommend their DVR service to a friend (8-10), and 77% highly rate their DVR (8-10)
68% of VOD users who also have a DVR agree (8-10) that their TV service is better because they have both services"
Source: Press release from Leichtman Research Inc, 10th September 2009

36% of American homes own at least one digital video recorder (DVR)

"New consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG) found that 36% of TV households in the United States have at least one Digital Video Recorder (DVR) -- an increase from just 8% four years ago.
In addition, 63% of all digital cable subscribers have ever used Video on-Demand (VOD), with 88% of this group having watched an on-Demand program or movie in the past month. Overall, about twice as many cable subscribers have used VOD as four years ago"
Source: Press release from Leichtman Research Group Inc, 10th September 2009

12% of American households own an Apple computer, up from 9% in 2008

"According to leading market research company The NPD Group’s 2009 Household Penetration Study, approximately 12 percent of all U.S. computer owning households own an Apple computer, up from 9 percent in 2008. While Apple ownership is growing, those households are decidedly in favor of mixed system environments. Of those 12 percent, nearly 85 percent also own a Windows-based PC.
Multiple computer ownership is a common thread in Apple computer households, with 66 percent of households owning three or more computers, compared to just 29 percent of Windows PC households.
Apple owning households are decidedly more mobile as well, with 72 percent of them owning a notebook, whereas only 50 percent of households that have a Windows PC own a notebook.
Not only do Apple computer owners own more computers (and more mobile computers) than the norm they also tend to own more types of electronics, and more of them, than typical computer owning households. For example, while 36 percent of total computer owning households have an iPod, 63 percent of Apple households have one. And while almost 50 percent of Apple owners own some type of navigation system, only about 30 percent of all computer households own one."
Source: Press release from NPD Group, 5th October 2009

$580 million was invested in advertising technology companies in the first half of 2008

Ad Tech Paul Fisher

View more presentations from paulronaldfisher.

Source: Chart 8 of this presentation by Advent Ventures, 2008

Singer T Pain has sold 300,000 iPhone apps at $2.99 each in 3 weeks

"In the first 3 weeks alone, the application has seen 300,000 downloads. The average user spends around 66 minutes within the application — an absolutely ludicrous number for any app, much less one out of the entertainment category. To date, 4.1 million performances have been recorded within the application."
Source: Mobile Crunch, 1st October 2009

17% of the time Americans spend online is on social networking and blogging sites

"The Nielsen Company today reported that time spent on social network and blogging sites accounted for 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet in August 2009, nearly triple the percentage of time spent on the sector a year ago."
Note - this excludes video sharing sites like YouTube, which are effectively social sites, so the total percentage of time spent on social media sites would be much higher
Source: The Nielsen Company, as reported in a press release, 23rd September 2009

367 US hospitals use social media tools

"367 Hospitals total
186 YouTube Channels
190 Facebook pages
267 Twitter Accounts
35 Blogs"
Source: Ed Bennett, a hospital web manager, on his blog, last updated 21st September 2009

Half as many US internet users click on ads as did 2 years ago

"The collaborative studies focus on an understanding of how U.S. Internet users click on display ads. The updated results based on March 2009 comScore data, and presented by comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni and Kim McCarthy, manager, Research & Analytics at Starcom, at the iMedia Brand Summit in San Diego on September 14, 2009, indicated that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32 percent of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16 percent in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8 percent of the Internet user base) accounting for the vast majority (85 percent) of all clicks.
[...]
The original research, conducted using July 2007 comScore data, showed that 32 percent of Internet users clicked on at least one display ad during the month. These clickers were segmented into Heavy, Moderate and Light Clicking segments based on the group of users accounting for the top 50 percent of clicks (heavy), middle 30 percent (moderate), and bottom 20 percent (light). In 2007, comScore, Starcom and Tacoda found that heavy clickers represented 6 percent of U.S. Internet users, moderate clickers accounted for 10 percent and light clickers accounted for 16 percent. By March 2009, those numbers had dropped substantially in each case, to 4 percent of Internet users for heavy clickers, 4 percent for moderate clickers and 8 percent for light clickers."
Source: Natural Born Clickers report by comScore, Starcom USA and Tacoda, reported in a press release, 1st October 2009

More than 20% of Japanese internet users are online for >6 hours on their days off

"Concerning these results 98.3% of Japanese have a fixed internet connection at home and over 70% use internet at home more than 1h every day. When it comes to holidays or days off astonishing 22% of Japanese become hardcore internet users with a usage of more than 6h per day. About 25% of these hardcore users surf the web even more than 12h per day off. Compared to the last survey end of 2008 the heavy users ratio increase by more than 1%"
Source: Research from Japan.Internet.com & Goo Research, reported by the Cyber Media blog, 1st October 2009