A “Real-Time” Look at Social Web Growth

By Bob Troia

I recently came across a pretty nifty widget that illustrates the exponential growth of the “social web”. Similar to the famed National Debt Clock, although the chart doesn’t pull in “real-time” data, the information it dynamically presents is based on a number of key social web data points from a number of sources, i.e.:

  • 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
  • Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
  • Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
  • iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
  • 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
  • YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
  • Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
  • Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
  • Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
  • Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
  • SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Although not “real-time”, the chart still provides some interesting visual cues – for example, note that iPhone apps are being downloaded at a faster rate than new blog posts are being posted!)

If anyone has come across any similar types of charts, please let me know in the comments area below. Thanks!