Tag: statistics
Internet population hits one billion, or 15% of world population
Internet stat-tracker ComScore has just announced that it reckons that world internet usage topped 1 billion in December 2008, 14.9% of the estimated population of the world in July 08. Asia-Pacific, including China, sent the most users, followed by Europe, followed by North America. However, the USA comes second in the ranking by country, with the UK in fifth.
Interestingly the stats don’t include access from public computers, like Internet Cafes, or access from mobile phones. In reality, therefore, the figure’s likely to be considerably higher. 77% of the world uses Google to search, which is a massive figure, and Wikipedia is fifth in the most-viewed-websites list, with 27% of the world visiting it. Facebook sits in seventh.
Press Release (via TheNextWeb)
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95% of music downloads in 2008 were illegal, says IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, is basically an international version of the RIAA and BPI, who claim to act as a trade body for record labels, but seem to only exist in reality to head up the music industry’s anti-piracy campaign. True to that role, last night it released a statement claiming that 95% of music downloads in 2008 were illegal.
However, there’s some bright news for the labels hidden in there too – download sales are up 25% on last year, and now make up a fifth of all recorded music sales. The IFPI reckons that it’s worth £2.5 billion.
Phone problems on New Year's night? Cut the networks some slack…
O2 announced today that a record number – 166,000,000 – of text messages were sent over its network during the 24-hour period ending at 7.30am on New Year’s Day. That’s 1,900 a second, but obviously in the hour or so around the New Year, that will have been considerably higher.
Extrapolating out a bit, given three and a half other major phone networks, that means that something like half a billion messages were sent in the UK in a 24-hour period. I’m an O2 customer, and had a perfectly fine phone conversation just after midnight with no connection problems whatsoever. If you’ve got a system that can cope with that, and survive unscathed, then I salute you.
O2 Media Centre (via @O2UKOfficial)
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Female players now make up about 40% of the MMO population
How convenient. Just yesterday, I was railing against stereotypes of virtual world inhabitants. Today, out pops a survey stating that those stereotypes couldn’t be further off the mark. Players of EverQuest II were recruited in game and asked to fill out a web-based questionnaire.
The findings? Most of the “hardcore” players are female, gamers are healthier than average, and game-playing is becoming a more social activity. Some other interesting results came out – the rate of bisexuality among female players is five times the national average, and whereas male players’ goal was often to “win” and complete things, female gamers were more interested in the social aspects of the hobby.
Just as computing, and console gaming are now seen as gender-neutral activities, so will MMOs and virtual worlds be in the coming years. In the meantime, don’t necessarily expect that massive orc warrior in your dungeon to be a bloke.
(via BBC)
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Facebook hits 140 million active users
The social networking behemoth rumbles on. As of yesterday, Facebook has over 140 million active users. The site is growing at a rate of 600,000 users a day. That’s a whole lot of poking.
Extrapolating the trend, you find that by March the company could hit 200 million active users. Interestingly, 70% of the growth is coming from outside the States, meaning that the market in the USA (and likely the UK, too) has possibly matured and is no longer growing as fast.
Spore becomes most pirated game ever
Largely thanks to the draconian DRM bundled with Will Wright’s ‘Spore’, the life-simulation game has been downloaded an epic 1.7 million times since its release at the start of September. If my maths is right, that means that one copy is downloaded every five seconds or so. If that rate had been maintained over the whole year, then people would have snagged 6.5 million copies.
Interestingly, second place in this year’s top ten most pirated games, published by Torrentfreak, was the Sims 2, showing that piracy isn’t limited to hardcore gamers (who generally hate the Sims), it’s become a perfectly mainstream pastime among ordinary people. It’s impressive that despite being released in 2004, it’s still right up at the top of the list, though it’s unclear how The Sims 2’s multiple add-on packs are counted.
(via MCVUK)
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Last.fm mashup maps every artist ever
This beautiful cloud represents the entirety of music. Every single artist tracked by Last.fm is marked as a point on the map, and ‘similar’ artists are connected by a grey line. The size of each point reflects the popularity of the artist, and different colours represent different genres.
It’s the creation of Budapest University PhD candidate Nepusz Tamas, who hammered Last.FM’s servers for over a week with a request every five seconds. Unfortunately, the only way to interact with the map is to pinpoint your favourite bands, and you can’t zoom in, but it’s still a beautiful representation of the world’s listening habits.
Reconstructing the structure of the world-wide music scene with Last.fm (via Listening Post)
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Firefox hits 20% market share
I feel a bit guilty. I’ve almost completely abandoned my former favourite browser – Firefox – in favour of Google’s zippity-quick Chrome browser. I love Firefox, but the little tiny touches in Chrome make it a joy to use compared to the relative clunkiness that is Firefox 3. Still, in a world where most people are still using Internet Explorer, it should be celebrated that 1 in 5 people on the internet are now using Firefox for their surfing needs.
The report, from Net Applications, shows Firefox with a 20% market share for two out of four weeks in October. Firefox didn’t have a major release then, so it’s doubly impressive that it’s still building converts across the world. New features are constantly announced, including a private browsing mode (dubbed ‘porn mode’ by some) in a forthcoming 3.1 update.
Firefox (via ReadWriteWeb)
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STATTACK: You're twice as likely to get your phone nicked in London than in New York
If there was ever a reason to go to GameCityThree, rather than the London Games Festival, then this is it. Carphone Warehouse reckons that 25% of adults in London have had their phone nicked, compared to 15% in the rest of the country. 14% of British teenagers have had their phone stolen, compared to 9% of teens in the USA, and 7% of adults. In London in 2007, there were three robberies per 1000 people, whereas in New York, there were only 1.61…
Radiohead "pay what you want" numbers released
Ever since Radiohead’s revolutionary “pay what you want” experiment on their most recent album, “In Rainbows”, the band has steadfastly refused to release any figures on how successful it was.
This led some to conclude that it was a massive flop with millions paying nothing. However, the band’s publisher, Warner-Chapell, has just released figures proving doubters wrong. Across all mediums, physical and download, the band sold three million albums. Considering their previous three albums sold in the low hundreds of thousands, that’s not too bad…
