Social media and Web 2.0 statistics: a round-up

In order to truly understand a business sector and develop an expertise, an avid reading habit is required. thebluedoor is a digital PR agency so consequently our reading material is quite varied to cover both the PR sector and those of our clients. Our PR focused reading list is quite broad (both online and in dead-tree format), and includes Wired, New Media Age, .Net, PR Week, Marketing Week, B2B Marketing and The Economist.

I thought it might be useful to post some of the recent digital media and online PR statistics that we have read about.

Facebook:

• 300 million global active users
• 22 million UK active users
• 50% log in and spend 25 minutes daily
• Average 'heavy' users spent 125 hours over the last 12 months
• 59% year on year growth
• 75% of all time spent on social networks
• 8,325 billion minutes spent in the UK in September 2009

(Sources - B2B Marketing; NMA/Nielsen)


LinkedIn:

• 52 million users globally
• 3 million in the UK
• Growing at 1 million every 12 days

(Source - B2B Marketing)


Twitter:

• 1,959% year on year growth
• US leads by Twitter countries, followed by UK
• 6th largest social media site
• There have been over 8,000,000,000 Tweets to date, and counting

(Source - NMA: Nielsen; GigaTweet)


Wikipedia:

• 3,1720,120 articles in English
• 19,245,419 pages in English
• 684,000,000 visitors in 2008

(Source - Wikipedia)


iPhone App Store:

• 30 million iPhone users
• 20 million iPhone Touch owners
• Over 2 billion apps have been downloaded from 100,000 apps
• AdMob estimates that $200 million worth of apps are downloaded per month ($2.4 billion per year)
• By June 2009, the app software-development kit had been downloaded 1,000,000 times

(Source - Wired: AdMob)


3G Phones:

• 3G mobile penetration in western Europe has risen from 17% in 2007, to 29% in 2009
• It is forecast to reach to 67% in western Europe by 2011
• In Japan penetration rate is 67%
• $43 billion was made from mobile Internet in Japan in 2008
• 610 million of the first two billion App Store downloads were for paid applications

(Sources - Wired: Morgan Stanley, Pinch Media)


Blogs:

• 133,000,000 blogs indexed by Technorati
• 3,561,000 RSS subscribers to TechCrunch
• 346,000,000 people read blogs
• 900,000 new blog posts every 24 hours

(Source - Technorati)

I tend to bookmark interesting articles on Delicious. Do have a look at what I've been reading recently, and I would be grateful of any recommendations. Thanks!