10 billion songs have been downloaded from iTunes

"Apple® today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over 10 billion songs from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com), the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store. The 10 billionth song, “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash, was purchased by Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia. As the winner of the iTunes Countdown to 10 Billion Songs, Louie will receive a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. iTunes is the number one music retailer in the world and features the world’s largest music catalog with over 12 million songs."
Source: Apple press release, 25th March 2010
Previously - 8 billion downloads reported on 23rd July 2009

50m tweets are posted every day

Click to enlarge

"Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)
Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We'll make time to share more information so please stay tuned."
Source: Kevin Weil of twitter, writing in the company's blog, 22nd February 2010

Fewer than 20% of the Top 100 videos on YouTube are user generated content

Source: Data from TubeMogul, reported by AllThingsDigital, 17th February 2010
There's a version of the data as a bar chart here
Note - the reason that they are strange percentages, rather than whole numbers, is that they look at a rolling list of the Top 100s over time. E.g. it might be 18 ugc videos one day, and 16 another day.

31% of American households have no internet connection

"Just 31 percent of American households lacked an Internet connection as of October 2009, down from 38 percent in 2007. The vast majority of those homes use a broadband connection, with the share of households with a dial-up connection slipping below 5 percent, according to data released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the U.S. Census Bureau"
Source: National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the U.S. Census Bureau, reported in Mercury News, 19th February 2010

Farmville sells 800,000 virtual tractors every day

"FarmVille has nearly 81 million monthly uniques on Facebook, and [Gerd] Leonhard pointed to sales of 800,000 virtual tractors daily. Several months ago, BusinessWeek estimated annual revenues for parent Zynga at $100 million, though more recent estimates have pushed past $200 million."
Source: Gerd Leonhard, speaking at MIDEM, reported by DigitalMusicNews, 18th February 2010
Note - a virtual tractor costs $3.33

Over 27% of American mobile users use the mobile web

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Source: comScore MobiLens, comScore, Inc. quoted in a press release, 8th February 2010

American mobile internet usage

"Mobile phones are a social connector.
91% of mobile users go online to socialize, compared to only 79% of traditional users. They are using their mobile phones "at the moment" to connect with others. The top socialize intents are:
Instant message – 62%
Forward e-mails (58%), content (40%) and photos (38%)
Post comments on social networking sites – 45%
Connect to people on social networking sites – 43%"
Source: The Mobile Intent Index follows Ruder Finn, quoted in a press release, 10th February 2010

2009 - The US digital year in review

"The U.S. core search market grew 16 percent in 2009, driven by a 6-percent gain in unique searchers and a 10-percent gain in search queries per searcher. Google and Bing led among the core search engines in terms of increases in market share.
Social networking continued to gain momentum in 2009 with nearly 4 out of 5 Internet users visiting a social networking site on a monthly basis and Facebook and Twitter propelling much of the growth in the category.
Display ad impressions grew 21 percent in 2009 as the online advertising sector increased its share of media spending. Growth was driven by an 8-percent increase in ad reach and a 12-percent increase in average frequency.
Total (retail and travel) U.S. e-commerce spending reached $209.6 billion in 2009, down 2 percent versus the previous year and the first year on record with negative growth rates. Nonetheless, e-commerce retail spending continued to increase its share of consumer spending in a challenging economic environment.
Six out of seven U.S. Internet users now view online video content in a month, with YouTube and Hulu continuing to experience rapid increase in viewership.
In the past year, the mobile industry witnessed smartphone ownership increase from 11 percent to 17 percent of mobile users, while 3G phone ownership increased from 32 percent to 43 percent."
Source: comScore press release, 9th February 2010

Highest selling digital songs & ringtones in the US, 2000-2009

"Highest certified digital song:
Group: Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” – 3x multi-Platinum (EMI/Capitol, 2008) and The Fray’s “How to Save a Life” – 3x multi-Platinum (Sony/Epic, 2006)
Male solo artist: Flo Rida’s “Low” – 5x multi-Platinum (Warner/Atlantic, 2008)
Female solo artist: Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” – 4x multi-Platinum (UMG/Interscope, 2008) and Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” – 4x multi-Platinum (Big Machine, 2008)

Highest certified master ringtone:
Group: D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” – 3x multi-Platinum (Atlantic, 2006), Hinder’s “Lips of an Angel” – 3x multi-Platinum (Universal Records, 2006), and Shop Boyz’ “Party Like a Rockstar” –3x multi-Platinum (Universal, 2007)
Male solo artist: Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” – 5x multi-Platinum (Universal/Cash Money, 2008)
Female solo artist: Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable” – 3x multi-Platinum (Sony/Columbia, 2006)"
Source: RIAA Press Release, 17th February 2010
Note - 'Platinum' = 1 million units

Demographics of American social networks

Age Distribution

Estimated Average Age

Click either to enlarge

Source: Data from Google AdPlanner, 2009, analysed and reported by Pingdom, 16th February 2010

Publisher Hachette made approximately 5% of its US revenues from eBooks in 2009

"In the United States, which posted double-digit growth to end September, sales fell by about 20% in the final quarter. During 2008, the Stephenie Meyer saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn) was a huge success, selling over 28 million copies, including 8 million in December alone. Consequently, the drop in Stephenie Meyer sales depressed revenue growth in the final part of 2009, with the impact only partly cushioned by the success of books by Edward Kennedy (True Compass), Uwem Akpan (Say You're One of Them) and Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers and What the Dog Saw). U.S. sales of e-books increased sharply during the year, reaching around 5% of total revenues in December."
Source: Press release from Lagardere, 11th February 2010
Note: "Lagardère Publishing is composed of prestigious brands including Grasset, Larousse and Hatier in France, Anaya in Spain, and Little, Brown and Company and Grand Central Publishing (Hachette Book Group) in the United States." (Source)

An average American Facebook user spends 7 hours a month on the site

"The average U.S. Internet user spends more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon combined. Think about that for a moment.
New numbers released by Nielsen today confirm what we’ve known for a while: Facebook is the web’s #1 time sink. What’s more interesting though is just how much more time we spend on the world’s largest social network today than we did 6 months ago.
Back in June 2009, Nielsen estimated that the average U.S. user spent 4 hours and 39 minutes on Facebook per month. That’s about 9.3 minutes per day in a 30 day month. In August, that number rose to 5 hours and 46 minutes, or 11.5 minutes per day.
In January 2010 though, the amount of time the average person spent on Facebook jumped to over 7 hours. Each American Facebook user spent an average of 421 minutes on Facebook per month, which amounts to over 14 minutes per day. Even if you lump together the time spent on Google (1:23), Yahoo (2:09), YouTube (1:02), Microsoft/Bing (1:35) Wikipedia (0:15), and Amazon (0:22), it still doesn’t beat Facebook."
Source: Nielsen, reported by Mashable, 16th February 2010

60,000 phones with the Android operating system are being shipped each day

"We’re in Barcelona keeping an eye on Eric Schmidt’s Mobile World Congress keynote, where the Google CEO just disclosed an interesting fact: Google and their hardware partners are now shipping 60,000 Android handsets each day.
Whether “shipped” here means “sold to end users” or “ordered by retailers” is unclear – but regardless, it’s quite the feat either way.
If that’s a true average rate and it holds true for the next year, that works out to about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21.9 million per year. Not only that, but the rate seems to be growing fairly rapidly; according to Schmidt, the rate has nearly doubled over the last quarter.
Solely as a point of reference for the curious: Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter."
Source: Eric Schmidt of Google at the MWC, reported by MobileCrunch, 16th February 2010

Farmville players exchanged 220m virtual Valentine's Day gifts in the first 18 hours of release

"Valentine’s day is still a few days away, and Zynga and the rest of the Social Games developers will surely be announcing the massive exchange of virtual goods after it has passed. In the meantime, we have a few numbers and descriptions of the available products from Zynga. First of all, Cafe World has ha 100 Million gifts exchanged so far, with 7.5M unique users have exchanged gifts. Farmville, Zynga’s biggest game at nearly 80 million Monthly Active Users, had 220 million Valentine’s Day gifts exchanged in the first 18 hours since their release. No word on the monetization of these goods, yet."
Source: AllFacebook, 10th February 2010

The long tail of video sites in the US account for 52% of all time spent watching video

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"According to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams. So there is hope yet for niche video producers.
The Nos. 2 through 25 sites account for the remaining 22 percent of video minutes. This group includes No. 2 video site Hulu, which just hit 1 billion monthly video streams in December, and fast-rising Netflix (no. 19). Hulu’s 1 billion streams accounted for 5.8 billion minutes of viewing time, up 140 percent from a year before."
Source: comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, reported by Techcrunch, 8th February 2010

Facebook sends more traffic to portals than Google does

"Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete's director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion's share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook.
Google, which has profited handsomely from directing Web surfers to their destinations during the past decade, was third with 7 percent, just behind e-commerce site eBay, which had 7.61 percent. MySpace was fourth with just under 2 percent."
Source: Data from Compete.com, reported by SFGate, 15th February 2010
Note: I think that this is US data only

Zynga games make up 5 of the 10 most popular Facebook applications

"Zynga games make up 5 of the ten most popular Facebook applications – Farmville has 79m monthly active users, Café World 30m, Texas HoldEm Poker 26m, FishVille 25m, & Mafia Wars 25m."
Furthermore Zynga is the top developer, with 233m monthly active users.
Source: AllFacebook, retrieved 15th February 2010

Foursquare had nearly 275,000 members by the end of January 2010

"Foursquare is primarily for letting your friends know where you are and figuring out where they are. Secondarily, it's for collecting points, prize "badges," and eventually, coupons, for going about your everyday business.
And it's becoming popular. Foursquare now has almost 275,000 users in less than a year."
Source: Business Insider, 28th January 2010
Update - Founder Dennis Crowley claims that they are nearly at 500,000 users

An average American household spends nearly $1,000 a year on subscriptions for entertainment and communications

"It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline."
Source: US Census Bureau, reported by the New York Times, 9th February 2010

The all-time most downloaded songs on iTunes

"1) "I Gotta Feeling," Black Eyed Peas
2) "Poker Face," Lady Gaga
3) "Boom Boom Pow," Black Eyed Peas
4) "I'm Yours," Jason Mraz
5) "Viva la Vida," Coldplay
6) "Just Dance," Lady Gaga & Colby O'Donis
7) "Low," Flo Rida (featuring T-Pain)
8) "Love Story," Taylor Swift
9) "Bleeding Love," Leona Lewis
10) "TiK ToK," Ke$ha
11) "Disturbia," Rihanna
12) "So What," Pink
13) "I Kissed a Girl," Katy Perry
14) "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," Beyoncé
15) "Hot N Cold," Katy Perry
16) "Stronger," Kanye West
17) "Live Your Life," T.I. (featuring Rihanna)
18) "Hey There Delilah," Plain White T's
19) "Right Round," Flo Rida
20) "Party in the U.S.A.," Miley Cyrus
21) "Don't Stop Believin'," Journey
22) "Bad Romance," Lady Gaga
23) "Use Somebody," Kings of Leon
24) "Fireflies," Owl City
25) "How to Save a Life," the Fray"
Source: Data from Apple, released in the run up to the 10 billionth download, reported by MTV, 11th February 2010

US teens text ten times an hour

"Nielsen analyzes more than 40,000 mobile bills every month to determine what consumers actually are spending their money on. The results are staggering: American teenagers are using 3,146 messages a month, which translates into more than 10 messages every hour of the month that they are not sleeping or in school. Even the under 12 segment are sending 1,146 messages per month, which is almost four text messages per waking hour that they are not at school.
While the 13-17 year old age bracket is already highly saturated, the last holiday season was good to the under 12 segment when it came to text messaging. A full 8 percent increase in SMS usage was measured combined with a near doubling in text message volume for that segment in the following quarter (Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are late in December, so usage increases will be recorded in Q1)."
Source: Research by Nielsen, reported on their blog, 27th January 2010

Super Bowl XLIV was the most watched TV programme in American history

"The New Orleans Saints' Super Bowl victory over the Indianapolis Colts has become the most-watched programme in US TV history, early figures show.
A record 106.5 million people, watched the game last weekend, according to Nielsen media.
The figure tops the 1983 finale of medical drama M*A*S*H which drew 105.97 million viewers.
The previous Super Bowl record was last year's game between Pittsburgh and Arizona, watched by 98.7 million."
Source: Nielsen Media, reported by BBC News, 9th February 2010

Over 100 million people access Facebook from their mobile phones

"There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products"
Source: Official Facebook Statistics, retrieved 12th February 2010
For some reason these stats weren't updated at the same time as the total user figures, which were updated on 9th February

55% of the smartphones sold in Q4 2009 had touch screens

"Touch screen devices now account for more than half of all smartphone sales around the world.
Market analyst Canalys reported that 55 per cent of the 54.5 million smartphones sold in the fourth quarter of 2009 were touch-enabled – the first time ever that the figure has topped 50 per cent.
A total of 166 million smartphones were shipped worldwide last year, including 75 million touch screen handsets, or 45 per cent.
The widening of the iPhone's network availability helped Apple to top spot in the manufacturers' stakes, with global iPhone sales of 25.1 million units.
However, rising strongly into second place was Nokia with 22.3 million. The Finnish phone giant launched a succession of touch-enabled devices in 2009, including the N97, N97 mini, the X6 music phone and the all-new N900 internet tablet".
Source: Data from Canalys, reported by ITPro, 10th February 2010

There were more tweets per day in January 2010 than in the whole of September 2008

"According to our research, Twitter is as of December processing more than one billion tweets per month. January passed 1.2 billion, averaging almost 40 million tweets per day. This is significantly more than Twitter was processing just a few months ago.
[...]
Some interesting observations:
December 2009 was the first month Twitter processed more than one billion tweets (with 1.036 billion tweets).
January 2010 had 16 times as many tweets as January 2009.
The activity on Twitter has doubled since August 2009.
January 2010 saw more tweets per day (39.5 million) than the whole of September 2008."
Source: Pingdom, 10th February 2010
Methodology:
"To be able to calculate the number of tweets per month, we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself."

Facebook has >400m active users

"Company Figures
More than 400 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 60 million status updates posted each day
More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
More than 3.5 million events created each month
More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Average User Figures
Average user has 130 friends on the site
Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
Average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month
Average user is invited to 3 events per month
Average user is a member of 13 groups

International Growth
More than 70 translations available on the site
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform
More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
More than 500,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month
Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect

Mobile
There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products"
Source: Official Facebook Statistics, retrieved 9th February 2010.
Earlier figures here (>350m active users, December 2009)

16.8m people in the UK have a Nectar card

"Nectar, whose partners include Sainsbury's and BP, has overtaken Tesco's Clubcard to become the biggest loyalty card in Britain.
The card said it had added over a million holders in the past year - taking the total to 16.8 million.
That exceeds both Tesco's card, with just over 16 million holders, and about 15 million Boots Advantage Card holders. The milestone comes as Tesco's card prepares to celebrate its 15th anniversary this month.
Nectar has added Homebase in the past year, giving it 14 partners and about 400 internet sites."
Source: This Is Money, 8th February 2010

Video game sales across the US, Japan & the UK fell by 8% Y-o-Y in 2009

"Video game software sales across the world's three largest markets--the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom--fell 8 percent in 2009, according to a joint report issued Wednesday by a consortium of industry analyst firms. The UK led the way with a 14 percent plunge.
[...]
According to the Top Global Markets report, video game software sales in the U.S., Japan and the UK totaled 379.3 million units in 2009. Japan had the smallest decline, with software sales just 2 percent lower overall than 2008, though console game sales were down 5 percent. In the U.S., software sales were down 7 percent."
Source:The annual Top Global Markets report, by The NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track, and Enterbrain, reported by CNET News 3rd February 2010

24 million young Chinese are addicted to the internet

"The number of young Chinese addicted to the Internet leaped to 24 million last year, a survey showed, as state media and some Chinese parents fret over social ills said to be linked to the Web.
Online games are often seen as a main cause of Internet obsession among adolescents in China, and state media have blamed them for contributing to problems as wide-ranging as teen pregnancy and violent crime.
The number of Web-addicted youths was nearly double the figure from 2005, and accounted for one in seven young Internet users, the state-run newspaper China Daily said Wednesday, citing a survey by the China Youth Association for Network Development. Nearly half of the young people surveyed use the Web to play games, the report said."
Source: Survey by the China Youth Association for Network Development, reported by China Daily, and then by PCWorld, 3rd February 2010

The iPhone was the third best selling smartphone in 2009, with a 14.4% market share

"According to IDC's market report, Apple shipped 25.1 million iPhones in 2009 capturing 14.4% of smartphone market share. This represents a 81.9% year-over-year growth for iPhones. Apple's fourth quarter iPhone shipments stood at 8.7 million representing a market share of 16%. Nokia still holds the top spot with 67.7 million shipments, representing a 38.9% market share followed by RIM with 34.5 million shipments and 19.8% market share for 2009.
HTC and Samsung captured 4.6% and 3.3% smartphone market share respectively, while rest of the vendors represented 19% of the 174.2 million smartphones shipped in 2009."
Source: IDC, reported by A4AAPL, 5th February 2010

Bit.ly received 2.1 billion clicks on its links in November 2009

"“People shorten the URL, send it to their wife and say, ‘Hey honey, look at this product’,” said John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks Studio, which runs bit.ly, the world’s most popular address shortening website.
“Somewhere in the region of 10 per cent of the bit.ly links get an extraordinary number of clicks. Links to big stories, such as Tiger Woods stories get millions of clicks.”
Bit.ly received 2.1 billion clicks on to links created by its shortening service last month."
Source: The Times, 7th December 2009

Over 60 million Americans listen to some form of internet radio in a typical week

"Just over 60 million Americans listen to some form of Internet radio in a typical week. This includes both AM/FM simulcast streams and Internet-only radio (e.g. Pandora, AccuRadio).
84% of this group regularly listens for at least five minutes to AM/FM simulcast streams in a typical week.
62% of the total streaming group regularly listens for at least five minutes listening to Internet-only streams."
Source: Press release from Bridge Ratings, 2nd February 2010

The UK, Germany and France collectively account for 70% of all eCommerce spending in Europe

"UK consumers also topped the online retail spending tables in 2009 with an average annual spend of £1,102, compared to a European average of £774 on 20 items with an average cost per item of £39. The UK was followed by Denmark (£1,079) and Norway (£979). On average UK consumers purchased the greatest number of items in 2009 (37), whereas the Polish bought the least (10).
At £44, the average cost per item in France was 48% higher than in the UK, which at £30 was the lowest in Europe. Norway had the highest spend per item at £75.
The research also found that:
25% of UK shoppers are now prepared to spend £1,000 or more online in a single transaction
57% of UK consumers made online purchases — almost 20% higher than the European average of 38%
Poland, with a forecast growth rate of 36%, France (31%) and Spain (25%) will experience the fastest growth this year. As the most mature ecommerce market, the UK will grow the least (12.4%) to £42.7bn.
European online sales will grow by 20% to reach £153bn overall in 2010, accounting for 5.5% of overall European retail sales.
The UK, Germany (£29.7bn of sales in 2009) and France (£22bn) account for 70% of total online sales in Europe. The countries with the lowest overall online spend in 2009 were Poland (£2.2bn), Finland (£2.3bn) and Norway (£2.9bn).
The rankings of the ‘big online three’ (UK, Germany and France) have not changed since 2003, although during this period online sales in France have grown by 244%, compared to 171% in the UK and 183% in Germany"
Source: Research from the Centre for Retail Research, commissioned by Kelkoo, and reported by Internet Retailing, 2nd February 2010

Online sales now account for nearly 10% of total UK retail sales

"UK shoppers spent more online than anywhere else in Europe last year, accounting for almost a third of all European sales, research suggests.
UK consumers spent £38bn online in 2009, or an average of £1,102 per shopper, according to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR).
Online sales now account for almost 10% of total retail sales in the UK, the centre calculates."
Source: Research from the Centre for Retail Research, commissioned by Kelkoo, and reported by BBC News, 1st February 2010

The Guardian's national newspaper division lost £36.8m in 2008-9

"Guardian Media Group today reported major losses of almost £90m as it complained that its national newspapers and websites were operating in the "toughest trading conditions seen for many years". The group's regional newspapers suffered plunging profits while the radio business made a significant loss.
In its annual report for 2008-2009, GMG, which publishes The Guardian and The Observer newspapers, reported a pre-tax loss of £89.8m, compared with a profit last year of £306.4m, on turnover which was down to £405.4m compared with £502.1m.
Guardian News & Media, the group's national newspaper division, reported an increase in operating losses to £36.8m, compared to £26.4m in 2008, on a reduced turnover of £253.6m compared with £261.9m."
Source: Official Guardian accounts, reported by The Independent, 31st July 2009
The figure of £36.8m loss equates to £100,800 per day.

News Corporation made a profit of $259m on it's newspaper business in Q4 2009

"News Corp's newspapers delivered a 29% increase in profits to $259m, aided by cost cuts at British titles and by a robust performance from the Wall Street Journal. Despite ongoing financial woes on much of Fleet Street, Murdoch singled out the Sun for praise, saying it had achieved record weeks of advertising revenue recently and that it had "left other papers far, far behind in the contest for readers"."
Source: Official News Corp figures, reported by The Guardian, 3rd February 2010

American kids spend an average of 49 minutes per day listening to music, playing games, or watching TV on their phones

Click to enlarge

Source: Page 19 of Generation M2 - Media in the Lives of 8 to 18 Year Olds, The Kaiser Foundation, Janaury 1010
It's a free 85 page report - highly recommended!

Mobile phone ownership among American kids, by age

Click to enlarge

Source: Page 18 of Generation M2 - Media in the Lives of 8 to 18 Year Olds, The Kaiser Foundation, Janaury 1010
It's a free 85 page report - highly recommended!

A census of files available via BitTorrent

"File types
46% movies and shows (non-pornographic)
14% games and software
14% pornography
10% music
1% books and guides
1% images
14% could not classify"

99% of material infringed copyright:
"Overall, we classified ten of the 1021 files, or approximately 1%, as likely non-infringing, This result should be interpreted with caution, as we may have missed some non-infringing files, and our sample is of files available, not files actually downloaded. Still, the result suggests strongly that copyright infringement is widespread among BitTorrent users."
Source: Assessment of 1021 files avaiable on BitTorrent by Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton senior, reported by the Freedom to Tinker blog, 29th January 2010

1/3 of the search queries submitted to Google in 2009 had never been asked before

"Proportion of Google users in the United States making more than one query per day: 7 out of 10
Proportion of Google users in the United States making more than 10 queries per day: 1 out of 7
Fraction of Google queries, duplicates excluded, never seen before: More than 1/3
Fraction of Google queries, duplicates included, never seen before: More than 1/5
Country with the greatest increase in Google web search traffic in 2009 vs. 2008: Indonesia*
Approximate percentage of Internet users in Indonesia: 11.1%*
Average amount of time it takes a user to finish entering a query: 9 seconds
Average amount of time it takes Google to answer a query: Less than 1/4 second
Number of search quality improvements made by Google in 2009: 540, ~1.5 each day
Proportion of Google result pages that show a map in search results: 1 in 13
Average increase in driving distance on weekends vs. weekdays on Google Maps: 11km
Median distance from a user's location to ice skating rinks found on Google Maps: 30km
Median distance from a user's location to ski resorts found on Google Maps: 300km"
Source: Google search blog, 8th January 2010, based on weekday US traffic unless stated

The global search market grew by 46% in 2009

"The total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 2.9 million per minute. The U.S. represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or approximately 17 percent of searches conducted globally. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Among the top ten global search markets, Russia posted the highest gains in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion, followed by France (up 61 percent to 5.4 billion) and Brazil (up 53 percent to 3.8 billion)."
Source: Press release from comScore, 22nd January 2010

6.5 million homes in the UK have Sky+

"The satellite broadcaster is within touching distance of reaching its long-held target of 10m households after adding 172,000 net new customers in the three months to the end of December, to hit 9.7m.
BSkyB managed to sign up 482,000 households to its Sky+ HD service in the same period, a 156% year-on-year increase, to take the total number of households to 2.08m.
The company's share price rose by 13.5p, or 2.44%, to 567.5p by 8.45am on the back of the strong results.
"It has been another good quarter in what remains a tough environment, with more customers joining Sky and strong demand across our entire product range," said the BSkyB chief executive, Jeremy Darroch, who today announced a further increase in the company's dividend on the back of a solid financial performance.
"The standout performance came in high definition TV with almost half a million [more] customers choosing Sky+HD."
The company admitted it had spent an extra £70m in the six months to the end of December on marketing its HD service.
BSkyB increased the number of customers using its Sky+ personal video recorder set-top boxes by 553,000 in the three months to the end of December. The total Sky+ customer base now stands at 6.5 million."
Source: Sky financial results, reported by The Guardian, 28th January 2010