Blog > December 2011

We love web data here at Brandwatch, especially social media metrics, and are always interested in displaying it in different ways.

Happily for us, the man behind popular web blog Personalize Media put together a wonderful stats counter about social media way back in 2009.

Due to the rapidly evolving nature of social media, the stats need updating all the time and the latest iteration reveals some fascinating insights.

• There are 2.3 billion Google +1s clicked a day

• Half a million new Android users register their account each day

• Amazingly, despite the staggering billion tweets sent out every week, YouTube videos receive view counts twenty times that

• Facebook now generates £2,500,000,000 a year in advert revenues

• Around 10 billion apps for iOS devices are downloaded each year

• Within just three weeks, Google+ had over 20 million accounts

• There were 80 million new Facebook accounts registered between January and April this year, and there are half a million Twitter profiles activated every day. LinkedIn is not far behind, with a million new users a week

• A mind-boggling 300,000,000 minutes of call time are clocked on Skype per month

• Google Chrome has risen from 10 to 20% of web browser market share in the past year

• A casual 30 billion items are shared on Facebook each month

Despite some questionable calculations when arriving a statistics like the US movie industry loss due to piracy, this popular little counter also allows you to view statistics on the mobile, games and somewhat condescending, but probably true, ‘heritage’ industries.

[Note: you may need to refresh your browser page for the widget to appear]

We are experts at trawling the web in search of insights, and our tool is potently equipped for us to do so. Sometimes though, it’s just nice to take a step back and absorb some of the amazing statistics that not even the most ambitious of prophets could have predicted just ten years ago.