Turn Any Surface Into A Touchscreen

By PSFK

It may become possible to transform a variety of surfaces into a touch sensitive screen. Displax has created a incredibly thin, interactive film that can be applied onto surfaces both curved and flat.

Wired reports:

Displax’ latest technology works on both opaque and transparent surfaces. The films have a 98 percent transparency–a measure of the amount of light that is reflected through the surface. “That’s a pretty decent transmission rate,” says Widgor.

A grid of nanowires are embedded in the thin polymer film that is just about 100 microns thick. A microcontroller processes the multiple input signals it receivers from the grid. A finger or two placed on the screen causes an electrical disturbance. This is analyzed by the microcontroller to decode the location of each input on that grid. The film comes with its own firmware, driver–which connect via a USB connection–and a control panel for user calibration and settings.

Currently, it can detect up to 16 fingers on a 50-inch screen. And the projective capacitance technology that Displax uses is similar to that seen on the iPhone, so the responsiveness of the touch surface is great, says Fonseca.

And if feeling around the screen isn’t enough, Displax allows users to interact with the screen by blowing on it.

A world of connections

From The Economist print edition

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

THE annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, currently in progress, is famous for making connections among the global great and good. But when the delegates go home again, getting even a few of them together in a room becomes difficult. To allow the leaders to keep talking, the forum’s organisers last year launched a pilot version of a secure online service where members can post mini-biographies and other information, and create links with other users to form collaborative working groups. Dubbed the World Electronic Community, or WELCOM, the forum’s exclusive online network has only about 5,000 members.

But if any service deserves such a grand title it is surely Facebook, which celebrates its sixth birthday next month and is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google. The globe’s largest online social network boasts over 350m users—which, were it a nation, would make Facebook the world’s third most populous after China and India. That is not the only striking statistic associated with the business. Its users now post over 55m updates a day on the site and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content with one another every week. As it has grown like Topsy, the site has also expanded way beyond its American roots: today some 70% of its audience is outside the United States.

Although Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, there are a number of other globetrotting sites, such as MySpace, which concentrates on music and entertainment; LinkedIn, which targets career-minded professionals; and Twitter, a networking service that lets members send out short, 140-character messages called “tweets”. All of these appear in a ranking of the world’s most popular networks by total monthly web visits (see chart 1), which also includes Orkut, a Google-owned service that is heavily used in India and Brazil, and QQ, which is big in China. On top of these there are other big national community sites such as Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world’s Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers.

Going public

All this shows just how far online communities have come. Until the mid-1990s they were largely ghettos for geeks who hid behind online aliases. Thanks to easy-to-use interfaces and fine-grained privacy controls, social networks have been transformed into vast public spaces where millions of people now feel comfortable using their real identities online. ComScore, a market-research firm, reckons that last October big social-networking sites received over 800m visitors. “The social networks’ greatest achievement has been to bring humanity into a place that was once cold and technological,” says Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm.

Their other great achievement has been to turn themselves into superb tools for mass communication. Simply by updating a personal page on Facebook or sending out a tweet, users can let their network of friends—and sometimes the world—know what is happening in their lives. Moreover, they can send out videos, pictures and lots of other content with just a few clicks of a mouse. “This represents a dramatic and permanent upgrade in people’s ability to communicate with one another,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley veteran who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Ning, an American firm that hosts almost 2m social networks for clients.

And people are making copious use of that ability. Nielsen, a market-research firm, reckons that since February 2009 they have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. Measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy (see chart 2). Last October Americans spent just under six hours surfing social networks, almost three times as much as in the same month in 2007. And it isn’t just youngsters who are friending and poking one another—Facebook-speak for making connections and saying hi to your pals. People of all ages are joining the networks in ever greater numbers.

Social-networking sites’ impressive growth has attracted much attention because the sites have made people’s personal relationships more visible and quantifiable than ever before. They have also become important vehicles for news and channels of influence. Twitter regularly scores headlines with its real-time updates on events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks and on the activities of its high-profile users, who include rap stars, writers and royalty. And both Twitter and Facebook played a starring role in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama to victory in the presidential race.

Delivery time

But like Mr Obama, social networks have also generated great expectations along the way on which they must now deliver. They need to prove to the world that they are here to stay. They must demonstrate that they are capable of generating the returns that justify the lofty valuations investors have given them. And they need to do all this while also reassuring users that their privacy will not be violated in the pursuit of profit.

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

In the business world there has also been much hype around something called “Enterprise 2.0”, a term coined to describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace. Fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses. Among those being touted are services such as Yammer, which produces a corporate version of Twitter, and Chatter, a social-networking service that has been developed by Salesforce.com.

To sceptics all this talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of another internet bubble in the making. They argue that even a huge social network such as Facebook will struggle to make money because fickle networkers will not stay in one place for long, pointing to the example of MySpace, which was once all the rage but has now become a shadow of its former self. Last year the site, which is owned by News Corp, installed a new boss and fired 45% of its staff as part of a plan to revive its fortunes. Critics also say that the networks’ advertising-driven business model is flawed.

Within companies there is plenty of doubt about the benefits of online social networking in the office. A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The executives’ biggest concern was that social networking would lead to social notworking, with employees using the sites to chat with friends instead of doing their jobs. Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.

This special report will examine these issues in detail. It will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.

Goodbye DVDs: Netflix Streaming On The Rise

Highlighting the growing numbers of people using streaming video, Netflix reports that half of its 12 million users opt to watch movies on the company’s Watch Instantly service.

That figure is up 20% from last year.

[ via Silicon Alley Insider]

Giving Mobile Ads a Makeover

Google, Apple and Others Seek to Push Beyond Banners, Text Messages

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO And EMILY STEEL

Google, Apple and several start-ups are trying to break the mold in mobile advertising, hoping to persuade marketers to spend more on a format that the technology industry has been hyping for years, with little to show for it.

Until now, mobile advertising mainly consisted of small banner ads tucked into the corner of a mobile Web page or text-message ads that often resembled spam. As a result, the mobile-advertising market remained relatively small, even as mobile phones proliferated.

Google, Apple and others are putting money into changing that. In November, Google announced a $750 million agreement to acquire AdMob Inc., a company that sells a variety of mobile ads, including some that show the location of a retailer’s closest store on a map or allow mobile-device users to download music or watch a commercial between levels in a game.

This week, Google is also expected to launch a new type of mobile-search ad for high-end phones like Apple’s iPhone, says a person familiar with the matter. People who search for pizza, for example, might see a search ad with a phone number that they can click to call a nearby pizzeria.

Apple, meanwhile, bought mobile-ad company Quattro Wireless in January. On Monday, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said the company acquired Quattro to offer “a seamless way for our developers to make more money on their apps, especially those that are providing free apps.” An Apple spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

Amid much fanfare Wednesday, Apple introduced a multimedia tablet-style computer called the iPad. priced at as much as $829 for high-end models with 3G wireless capacity.

Marketers are carefully watching the iPad, which can run software applications similar to iPhone apps, along with other new products, as they look to broaden their strategies beyond first-generation mobile ads, such as text-messages ads.

Volkswagen started testing text-message ads in 2008 and hired digital ad shop AKQA to develop a mobile-advertising strategy for the brand last year. The company built a mobile-specific Web site and even launched its new GTI hatchback via a mobile game.

Now, the auto maker is building applications on its mobile Web site that allow VW owners to schedule service appointments or pay their bills and for prospective buyers to track incentives, said Charlie Taylor, Volkswagen’s general manager of digital marketing, in an interview.

Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, Barry Judge, wants to use mobile to make standard ads more interactive. A print ad or billboard, for instance, might give consumers an address they could text-message for more information.

Best Buy also is thinking about how to use mobile marketing to enhance customers’ shopping experiences, such as by building new applications or including special codes on its products to provide more information about them.

“This is going to be a big area. It may dwarf what the PC Internet does,” Mr. Judge says.

While the Google-Apple race heats up, start-ups like FourSquare and Loopt, are trying to sell marketers on new ways to target customers on their mobile phones.

Mobile social-networking service Loopt is developing a service that can target offers to the cellphones of people who walk into a specific store a certain number of times, says Loopt Chief Executive Sam Altman.

“Advertisers want to reach people near their doorway, and when they are at that critical moment about making a decision,” he said.

FourSquare, a software application that allows users to tell their friends when they have “checked in” at various locations like a restaurant, is looking at ways to charge for a similar service that sends special offers to people who regularly check in at an establishment or are nearby. Today, more than 600 venues are using a free version of the service, FourSquare says.

Tristan Walker, FourSquare’s head of business development, says the company may develop a paid offering, and is looking at ways to give marketers more data about the types of people who visit their stores, like which store they visited just prior.

“You could potentially turn it into a Google-like ad model where people bid on the latitude and longitude of where they want their ads to appear at certain times of day,” he says.

All the activity comes as mobile ads have yet to live up to what the tech industry says is their huge potential. Spending on mobile ads in the U.S. remains small–just $416 million in 2009, up from $320 million in 2008—according to market-research firm eMarketer. That’s a fraction of the $22.4 billion U.S. online advertising market.

Growth has been slower than expected as many mobile Web sites have yet to generate significant traffic and marketers have had a tough time creating campaigns. EMarketer predicted last February that mobile-ad spending would be $760 million in 2009, growing to $2.4 billion in 2012. The research firm now estimates that mobile-ad spending will reach just $1.1 billion by 2012.

“The growth has been disappointing,” says Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital, the group within WPP working to develop the ad company’s digital offerings. “The only large numbers on the table are the prices of the acquisitions—not the amount of revenue they’re generating.”

In an interview last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said serious growth in mobile advertising will take time. “It’s probably the case that the real impact on mobile [advertising] will come from products that aren’t yet built,” he said.

In particular, he cited potential advertising opportunities around new software applications, like augmented reality software, which gives people information about what their phone is pointing at, acting as another pair of eyes.

Apple could be another wild card.”The relationship that Apple has with developers [of apps for the iPhone] is a really tight one,” said AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui, in a recent interview. “I don’t really have a clear view of what that’s going to mean, but I do think it will be very different.”

AdMob and Google are continuing to operate as independent companies as they await word from the Federal Trade Commission, which is reviewing the deal on antitrust grounds. Google has said it remains confident “the FTC will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile-advertising space will remain highly competitive after this deal closes.”

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com and Emily Steel at emily.steel@wsj.com

Getting Past Viral

By Ivan Askwith

Agencies and clients alike often talk about “viral marketing” as if it’s something we choose to create. We describe viral as if it’s an inherent quality we can design into our campaigns, or a deliberate strategy we can execute on. But for the handful of “viral campaigns” that explode into cultural phenomena each year, hundreds of other efforts have little or no impact at all. In spite of this, we often continue to insist that we know how to “make things viral,” while also reassuring ourselves that some efforts “just catch on better than others.”

Unless we want to spend another year burning time and resources in the pursuit of that belief, it’s time to accept a difficult truth: viral isn’t a quality that we, as marketers, have the power to bestow. In fact, viral isn’t an inherent trait that advertising can have at all. Viral isn’t what a marketing campaign is, but how that campaign spreads. And when a campaign does achieve viral propagation, it’s not simply a function of what we do as designers and planners. Instead, it’s a function of deliberate choices that each consumer makes about what is worth sharing and why.

In that context, “viral” is a problematic way of thinking about marketing. As Henry Jenkins points out, viruses are transmitted whether their hosts wish to share them or not; they can’t be stopped, and the participants are helpless victims. Content, on the other hand, is only shared through intentional decisions. Unless consumers have a strong, personal motivation to share with each other, nothing gets passed along to anyone. If we want people to share things, we need to stop thinking in terms of “viruses” and start thinking in terms of “gifts” — things that people choose to give for specific reasons.

This might seem like simple semantics: when we say we want a viral campaign, we mean that we want marketing that will spread at an exponential rate similar to a virus. But when we insist on describing our work as viral marketing, we make two fatal mistakes: first, we forget that exponential pass-along between consumers is a result, rather than a strategy — the end, rather than the means — and second, we focus on creating better content, rather than better understanding the motives of the people who will choose to share, or not share, that content.

Then, as we begin to plan for 2010, it’s in our best interests to stop thinking about viral marketing, which moves from person to person like a virus, and instead focus on why people choose to share things with each other. We need to understand the spread of media in terms of actively giving gifts, not passively transmitting viruses. And to do that, we need to understand consumer behavior on the consumer’s terms, rather than our own. For now, let’s call this new model “consumer-driven marketing.”

How & Why People Share

Consumer-driven marketing, like traditional word-of-mouth, relies on an exponential growth pattern. Someone encounters a piece of content and chooses to share it with several friends. Each friend, in turn, shares it with several more. From a marketer’s perspective, the critical moment occurs when the consumer chooses whether or not to spread something to others. And unfortunately, since these decisions are expressed through metrics and analytics, both agencies and clients are conditioned to understand this moment in simple “yes-or-no” terms: either the consumer shared something, or they didn’t.

It’s time to move past this oversimplified understanding and accept three important truths: First, people share things for their own reasons, not ours. When consumers tell friends about a brand, they’re not trying to help the brand; they’re trying to help their friends. At the same time, they’re also making a statement about themselves and the recipient: “I want you to understand that I found this interesting, and believe you will too.” When we want consumers to share things, we need to focus on understanding and supporting their motives, rather than pretending consumers can be convinced to do something for our benefit.

Second, when people share, it impacts their reputation and relationships. When we give a gift, it’s because we assume it will have some value and relevance to the recipient. When it doesn’t, we waste the recipient’s time, reveal that we don’t know them well enough to recognize what interests them, and lower the odds that they will be interested in the next thing we share. If we expect consumers to give our marketing content to each other as gifts, we need to make sure it has enough value to reflect well on the consumer who gives it.

Third, when people give gifts, they don’t ask for favors in return. When giving gifts, we can’t also ask for something without undermining the gesture or seeming to be selfish. It makes sense that consumers are reluctant to send overt advertisements to each other, since such ads “want something” from them. In order for our work to spread, we need to focus on giving a lot of value, and asking little in return.

It’s also useful to understand that there are at least three specific scenarios in which people share content, each with distinct purposes, motives and behavior patterns:

1. Contributing (1-to-Many): When users participate in online interest communities, such as message boards or discussion-driven blogs, the act of sharing relevant content is often more casual and less deliberate. Within communities, where members share a common interest but have limited personal knowledge about other members, anything that might be interesting or useful has a good chance of being shared. At the same time, making valuable contributions within a community is an important way for members to “prove” that they belong, and the pride of being the first to discover something of value offers a powerful incentive to share.

2. Broadcasting (1-to-World): In more public spaces, such as Twitter, Facebook status messages and personal blogs, where consumers often speak without having an exact awareness of who they are speaking to, the act of sharing is more self-centric, and more about the person sharing than the person receiving. When a consumer shares something in these broadcast spaces, they generally offer an opinion to contextualize it, so that the act of sharing makes a statement about who they are, what they like, and how they wish to be perceived. In this context, consumers are likely to share anything that expresses their identities, opinions or strengths.

3. Gifting (1-to-1/Few): In more private, focused channels, such as email, IM and offline conversation, the act of sharing is most akin to gifting. Whether a person shares something will depend on how relevant and valuable it is to both the giver and the recipient, since the act of sharing something relevant — much like gossip — is intended to strengthen relationships and reinforce shared values. In this context, consumers are most likely to share anything that helps generate, strengthen or sustain connections.

What This Means for 2010

Rather than spending another misguided year trying to “engineer” viral campaigns that will propagate themselves, regardless of consumer intentions, it’s time to refocus our marketing efforts to align with the way that people actually behave.

It’s time to accept that all of our marketing efforts should start with an understanding of the needs and motives that guide consumer decisions and social behaviors, and not clever creative executions. We need to stop thinking about a mass audience that can be influenced and guided, and start thinking about the individual people we want to engage, as well as the people they want to engage. And we need to understand that effective marketing is no longer about making consumers serve our agenda, but finding meaningful opportunities to serve theirs.

It’s time to focus on creating value that consumers will have a personal stake in sharing with each other. We need to develop content that people will share because it reflects their personal values and sensibilities, helps them recognize others who share those values, and creates opportunities for satisfying interactions. We need to create services and experiences that people will use because they enable useful, meaningful and enjoyable social connections, or help them express their own personalities and identities, rather than making people into unwitting carriers of our taglines and brand propositions. We need to provide creative frameworks that let people express their own values and messages as a way of owning and aligning themselves with our brands. Above all, we need to stop asking people to talk about our brands, and start helping them talk through them.

When our campaigns meet those goals, the outcome will be both logical and inevitable: consumers will share them with each other, and the result will be an exponential increase in both brand engagement and endorsements. But when it happens, it will be because consumers got what they want from us, and not because we got what we wanted from them.

P&G Embraces Facebook as Big Part of Its Marketing Plan

Opens Silicon Valley Office Aimed at Increasing Social-Media Presence

By Jack Neff

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Procter & Gamble Co. loves Facebook after all, and besides encouraging brands to develop a presence there, the world’s biggest marketer has opened an office in Silicon Valley to help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities with the website.

P&G’s outlook on Facebook and social media as marketing tools appears rosier.

Those messages came in a meeting last week between P&G executives and venture capitalists, recounted by David Hornik on VentureBlog in a post that quickly picked up currency over the weekend on, of all places, Twitter.

“P&G’s explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that,” Mr. Hornik wrote. “And while P&G’s thought leaders expressed some skepticism about the efficacy of Facebook’s ‘engagement ads,’ they certainly view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building. They didn’t quantify what they are paying for that exposure, but it is quite clear that the numbers are very big.”

Mr. Hornik contrasted the enthusiastic outlook on Facebook to a less-enthusiastic one by P&G executives toward Twitter. “They described Twitter as ‘much more like television than one might think.’ To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one-to-many communications that are short bursts of timely information,” he wrote. “P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand-building and advertising side. … They do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook.”

Mr. Hornik, after being contacted by P&G over the weekend, did backtrack on one big number — a projection he had attributed to P&G that Facebook would reach 5 billion members globally. That 5 billion is actually the number of consumers P&G hopes to reach globally, up from the current 4 billion.

By whatever count, however, P&G’s outlook on Facebook and social media as marketing tools appears rosier than Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation, portrayed in a talk to a digital-marketing forum in Cincinnati in late 2008.

“What in heaven’s name,” he asked, “made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

“Who said this is media?” he said. “Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

He went on to say, noting it was personal preference rather than company policy, “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”

He also expressed discomfort about the level of personalized targeting available through Facebook, though he said that Facebook applications are potentially valuable vehicles for advertisers.

In an e-mail, a P&G spokeswoman wrote that Mr. McConnell was speaking for himself, not the company, at the time. “P&G sees the value of digital and social media in consumers’ lives and we want to connect with consumers in the environments where they are spending their time,” she said. “For example, Facebook fan pages for brands [are] an easy way to engage with consumers in a forum where they’ve chosen to engage with us. (i.e. Pringles’ fan page has over 2.8 million global fans). We don’t have social media figured out, but we are encouraging our brands to include digital and social media into their holistic brand-building strategies.”

She said the intended perspective on Twitter is that it’s “a communication platform that is good for ‘one-to-many’ communication, similar to TV. Additionally, some of our brands are using Twitter to engage with consumers one-on-one when they have questions. We also view Twitter as a valuable listening tool.”

She also clarified that what was referred to as an Innovation Center on VentureBlog is a “Connect & Develop” office near Palo Alto “to increase our presence in innovation hotspots,” but is not the size of the sprawling complexes that P&G typically terms “innovation centers.” Connect & Develop is a longstanding P&G program which seeks to solicit innovation from outside companies and consumers while also licensing its own technology to outside companies.

6 Ways to Get People to Believe You Online

Let’s be honest – the web isn’t always the easiest place to create trusted relationships. After all, the personal cues that we might use when meeting someone face to face don’t apply. You never know who may be behind the keyboard in any online conversation and there are plenty of unscrupulous characters ready to take your money, reputation or time in thousands of ways. This, unfortunately, is the online world we live in … and it is also the world that you must consider when trying to build relationships with your customers and promote your small business online.

Trust online matters. If you can build it right, then you can drive people to your business either online or in the real world. To build it amongst the many barriers online, there are some basic principles like trying to create a useful and engaging experience online and making sure that it WORKS (ie – a site that doesn’t crash all the time). That alone, however, won’t be enough. This post is meant to offer some ideas for what more you need to do beyond the basics:

1.    Talk like a real person. Nothing gives the impression that you’re faceless more than using completely neutral third person language across your site. Instead of using the same old marketing mumbo jumbo to describe your business, how about giving people a bit of the story behind your company? Why was it started and how did you build it? When you can tell a story in your own voice, it creates a foundation for believability in everything else you do online.

2.    Share your plans. If you think about your relationships in real life, when people share more about what they are thinking and planning to do, you feel more involved with them. Giving the inside story is a great way to build trust. There are several ways this could translate online. One may be to offer some sort of exclusive experience and content through a loyalty program or Fan page on a site like Facebook. Another could be to choose a set of customers to be part of an inside circle of advisors that you ask for feedback and inspiration. The more you can share online, the more people you can get invested in your business.

3.    Admit your failures. One of the things you can learn from Domino’s recent campaign about their Pizza is the power of admitting when you have failed. No one is perfect and sometimes it is the fallability in each of us and our businesses that can go the farthest to build trust.

4.    Respond directly. When it comes to social media and the world of the web, there are few things as powerful as finding a way to directly engage with your customers online. This could mean using a tool like Twitter to respond directly to customer feedback, or simply posting comments on blog posts that mention your business or the category your business is in.

5.    Use multimedia. As the cliche goes, a picture is certainly worth more than words, and online this is particularly true. If you can find a way to include more images of your retail location, or a photo gallery of your employees working together, or video of your products – each of these can go a long way to sharing the inside story behind your business and establishing a basis for trust.

6.    Encourage advocates. Sometimes the best way to build trust in your business is to have lots of people online saying good things about you. This could involve having more people review your business online, or finding people who are particularly vocal about the industry you are in and introducing them to your business. Whether it is an individual rating or a influential content creator – every voice that you can get supporting your business online will be another reason for people to trust you., so you’ve decided to start using the Internet to promote your business more actively and most people you talk to who know about the web tell you the same thing … you need to redesign your website. The problem for many small businesses is that getting to the point when you actually have the budget or manage to get the right help to do it may take some time.

Internet 2009 in numbers

By Pingdom

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Enjoy!

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Data sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

Social Influence Marketing Trends

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