YouTube viewers are watching more than a billion of hours of video a day

"YouTube viewers world-wide are now watching more than 1 billion hours of videos a day, threatening to eclipse U.S. television viewership, a milestone fueled by the Google unit’s aggressive embrace of artificial intelligence to recommend videos."
Source:  WSJ, 27th February 2017

Hashtags appeared in 30% of Super Bowl ads in 2017, down from 57% in 2014

Hashtags appeared in 30% of Super Bowl ads in 2017, down from a high of 57% in 2014 https://t.co/84rr0dWFV6 https://t.co/A4kw8sp7u7

— Techmeme (@Techmeme) February 7, 2017

WeChat users sent 46 billion 'Red Envelopes' over Lunar New Year 2017

"Users of WeChat sent around 46 billion electronic red packets - digital versions of traditional envelopes stuffed with cash - via the Chinese mobile social platform over the Lunar New Year period, the official Xinhua new agency reported on Saturday.
China has a long tradition of giving red packets during the Lunar New Year, which fell on Jan. 28 this year.
Internet giants such as Alibaba Group Holding have promoted the use of virtual red packets, also known as "hongbaos", to grow business in the country's booming mobile payment market.
The number of digital red packets sent via WeChat, owned by Alibaba rival Tencent Holdings Ltd, rose 43 percent in the Jan. 27 and Feb. 1 period compared with a year earlier, according to Xinhua.
People in the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong and Hebei led the red packets mania, Xinhua said. South Korea saw the most spending using WeChat Pay by Chinese travelers outside of mainland China, a Tencent spokesman told Reuters by email."

Source:  Reuters, 6th February 2017

A fan's live FA Cup video on Periscope had 139,000 viewers

"The Premier League have said they will take action against any fans broadcasting football matches on streaming websites via smartphones.
It is a new problem that is creeping into the game with fans inside stadiums filming the action on their phones and broadcasting it live on websites like the Twitter-owned Periscope platform.
One Manchester City fan who went to Selhurst Park on Saturday to watch his side's FA Cup clash with Crystal Palace decided to film and broadcast the entire match and pulled in an incredible 139,300 viewers."

Source:  Mail Online, 3rd February 2017

Snapchat has 158m daily active users

"A daily habit. In 2012, Snap says it went from 1,000 daily users to 100,000. A year later, it was at 1 million daily users. Now 158 million people on average use the service and create over 2.5 billion Snaps -- short videos or images -- every day. On average, more than 60 percent of the company's daily active users create Snaps with its camera every day. Users visit Snapchat more than 18 times a day, on average, and spend 25 to 30 minutes on the app.
[...]
Slowing growth? Snap warned that its daily active user base may not continue to grow, and that its user growth showed a slowdown in the past couple of quarters of 2016. In the beginning of the September quarter, its base increased 7 percent from the June quarter. But in the latter part of the September period, its user base was "relatively flat," which resulted in an overall 4 percent sequential rise. It also added only 4.5 percent more users from September to December (before that, the user base had risen sequentially in the double digits on a percentage basis).
iPhone effect. The "majority" of Snap's users have iPhones. "As a result, although our products work with Android mobile devices, we have prioritized development of our products to operate with iOS operating systems rather than smartphones with Android operating systems." Sorry, Google."

Source:  Data from Snap's IPO documents, reported by CNet, 3rd February 2017