Instagram has 13m users and 7 employees

"The popular photo app that’s responsible for flooding the internet with fuzzy, low-contrast, retro images of cats, hipsters and urban street scenes shows no sign of slowing down.
Of course we’re talking about Instagram and its iPhone-only app for sharing stylized photos. The startup attracted 12 million users in just over a year on the App Store. By early November, the small company — and we mean small; Instagram has just seven employees — grabbed another million and now boasts well over 13 million application users, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared with VentureBeat."

Source:  VentureBeat, 18th November 2011

Earlier - 10m users announced in September

Paypal's global mobile payments were 516% higher Y-o-Y on Black Friday 2011

"By using their mobile devices, shoppers have access to a “mall” in the palm of their hand, complete with millions of products and simple, secure payments, to find and buy the hottest holiday deals. An increasing number of shoppers turned to their mobile devices on Black Friday to shop wherever, whenever.
- eBay Mobile announced that shoppers in the U.S. purchased nearly two and a half times as many items via eBay Mobile this Black Friday when compared to 2010
- PayPal Mobile announced a six-fold (516%) increase in global mobile payment volume compared to 2010
- GSI Commerce announced a three-fold (254%) increase in U.S. mobile sales this Black Friday compared to 2010.
“Shoppers are increasingly choosing the convenience of mobile to find the best deals from wherever they are while avoiding big crowds and long lines,” said Steve Yankovich, vice president, Mobile, for eBay Inc. “The ability to simply pick up your phone or tablet and purchase what you want, when you want it, has become an attractive alternative to shoppers in record numbers this holiday season.”"
Source:  Press release from eBay, 26th November 2011

40% of mobile users in Canada have a smartphone

"8 million people in Canada owned smartphones in September 2011, representing 40 percent of the mobile market in Canada, a gain of 7 percentage points in the past six months. RIM ranked as the top platform with 35.8 percent of the smartphone market, followed by Apple at 30.1 percent. Google Android gained ground among the competition by doubling its market share to 25.0 over the past six months. Symbian ranked fourth with 4.2 percent share, followed by Microsoft with 3.2 percent."
Source:  Data from comScore, reported in a press release, 30th November 2011

The top 20 most-followed people on Google+

Rank, name, followers
"#1 Britney Spears 807,743
#2 Larry Page 780,994
#3 Snoop Dogg 681,127
#4 Mark Zuckerberg 612,321
#5 Tyra Banks 571,843
#6 Paris Hilton 525,609
#7 Richard Branson 515,344
#8 Jessi June 512,775
#9 Sergey Brin 502,636
#10 Vic Gundotra 495,516
#11 Tom Anderson 482,796
#12 Dane Cook 473,356
#13 will.i.am 432,883
#14 Trey Ratcliff 403,858
#15 Thomas Hawk 399,687
#16 Felicia Day 388,210
#17 Dalai Lama 378,951
#18 Hugh Jackman 374,329
#19 Guy Kawasaki 368,127
#20 Ron Garan 366,370"
Source:  SocialStatisics.com, retrieved 1st December 2011
Notes:
Jesse June is a glamour model (!)
Vic Gundotra is a techie at Google
Trey Radcliff & Thomas Cook are both photo bloggers
Dane Cook is a comedian & actor
Felicia Day is an actress
Ron Garan is a NASA Astronaut
Tom Anderson is 'Tom from MySpace'
Mark Zuckerberg has seemingly never added anything - people just think it's amusing to add him
Compare to the Twitter top 10 - 7 of those are women, only 4 of the G+ top 10 are; Britney Spears is the only person to appear on both lists.  The other striking things are that it's still comparatively 'techie' and photography is popular.

Spotify is the second single largest source of digital music revenue for labels in Europe

"Artists can — and do — receive very substantial revenues from Spotify, and as Spotify grows, these revenue streams will naturally continue to grow. Spotify is now the second single largest source of digital music revenue for labels in Europe (IFPI, April 2011) and we’ve driven more than $150 million of revenue to rights holders (ie whoever owns the music, be it artists, publishers or labels) since our launch three years ago.”"

Source:  Statement from Spotify, quoted in Wired, 18th November 2011

Twitter has 2,400 advertisers

"Twitter makes money three ways, says Bain. Twitter sells promoted tweets, promoted trends, and ads. Many brands, for example, want to know how to increase their followers. "We've scaled from next to no advertisers to more than 2,400,' says Bain.  "We have about 100 folks working directly with advertisers and agencies all over.  We thought were going to have to answer the question, 'Why Twitter?' But no advertiser has that question.""

Source:  Twitter Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain, quoted in SFGate, 30th November 2011

Earlier - 1,600 advertisers announced in early October

Internet advertising revenue in the US rose 22% Y-o-Y in Q3 2011

"Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. hit $7.88 billion for the third quarter of 2011, representing a 22 percent increase over the same period in 2010, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report figures released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC US. These figures also show a 2.7 percent uptick from the record-setting revenues of the second quarter of 2011. Results for Q3 2011 further mark the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth."

Source:  Press release from the IAB, 30th November 2011

Social, Digital & Mobile in Asia

We Are Social's Guide to Social, Digital & Mobile in Asia (Overview, Nov 2011)

View more presentations from We Are Social Singapore

The Guardian receives 1m page views a day from its Facebook app

"Facebook has released some intersting stats on its Open Graph features for media partners, which include Yahoo! News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Daily,  that it announced at f8. We already know that Facebook is a major driver of news traffic with twice as many getting their news via Facebook than any of social network, but the amount of traffic it is driving on a daily basis is striking.
The Guardian is picking up around one million pageviews a day while the Washington Post is getting 3.5 million monthly readers for its social reader app. The Independent has in excess of one million monthly active users are connecting their Facebook accounts and Yahoo News has seen a 600% increase in traffic.
That provides traffic that papers like the Guardian can sell ads against and it is also sending younger readers their way.
[...]
The Guardian: Built an app for Facebook.com and has been installed by nearly four million people, generating, on average, almost a million extra page impressions every day. Additionally, over half of the app’s users are 24 and under, “traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organizations,” said Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group."

Source:  The Wall Blog, 30th November 2011

American Online Christmas Sales by Week 2007-2011

Click to enlarge

Source:  Data from comScore, reported in a press release, 29th November 2011

The Economist's apps are accessed by 650,000 devices each month

"The Economist apps are currently available on iPhone, iPad and Android Smartphone.
- Since our launch in November 2010, the apps have been downloaded to over 2m iPhones and iPads.
- Every month over 650,000 unique devices access The Economist app content."

Source:  The Economist Group, retrieved 28th November 2011

84% of iPhone users say that they are loyal to the brand

"Apple is well ahead of rivals in building brand loyalty among its users in a mobile market where the key brands are rushing to build as large a foothold as possible, a study by research firm GfK showed.
Some 84 percent of iPhone users said they would pick iPhone also when they replace their cellphone, while 60 percent of consumers who use smartphones running Google's Android said they would stick with phones using the same software.
Only 48 percent of people using Research In Motion's cellphones said they would stay loyal to their Blackberrys, the study showed.
More than 70 percent of consumers said they would stick with their phones due to their seamless integration of features and access to content."

Source:  Research by GfK, reported by Reuters, 25th November 2011

Methodology:  "The research firm interviewed around 4,500 people in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, China, the United States and Japan."

The Daily Mail online had nearly 79m unique visitors in October 2011

"Daily Mail website Mail Online set a new monthly traffic record in October, recording just less than 79 million unique browsers during the period.
The figure, reported in the latest results from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, represents a 58 per cent year-on-year traffic increase for the site, which has been Britain's highest-traffic news site for the past 13 months consecutively.
According to Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online, just 27.8 million of its monthly unique browsers come from the UK.
In terms of traffic, Mail Online is the second largest English-language news website in the world, after the New York Times site.
The Guardian was the second most popular site, with an average of 3.3 million users per day, compared with Mail Online's 4.6 million. The Guardian didn't report a monthly figure.
The Telegraph was the second highest traffic site, averaging 2,292,052 unique browsers a day and 45,310,524 for the month."

Source:  ABC figures, reported by Journalism.co.uk, 24th November 2011

Online game Bigpoint generated revenues of over €2m in 4 days on sales of just one virtual item

"German online games publisher and developer Bigpoint made over 2 million euros of revenue this month on a single in-game item purchase.
The company's free-to-play MMO space shooter DarkOrbit, which launched in December 2006, has seen 66 million registered users in total over its five year life.
Earlier this month, BigPoint sold a special in-game item called 'The 10th Drone', which cost 1,000 euros to purchase, for a total of four days.
Simon Davis, producer on DarkOrbit, has now told Gamesbrief founder and Gamasutra contributor Nicholas Lovell that over 2,000 of these items were sold, meaning that over 2 million euros was spent on this single item over the course of four days."
Source:  Gamasutra, 23rd November 2011

20% of the page views at FT.com come from mobile devices

"The Financial Times has registered another digital milestone with the FT Web App seeing over one million users since its launch in June.
Available on the iPhone and iPad by visiting app.ft.com directly from the device’s web browser, almost half of its users have downloaded a shortcut to their iPad or iPhone home screen, replicating a native app experience.
The launch of the FT Web App has significantly boosted mobile and tablet traffic. FT.com now sees 20% of total page views and 15% of new B2C subscriptions each week coming directly from mobile and tablet devices. These readers are also more engaged, with FT.com users who register on mobiles and tablets 2.5 times more likely to subscribe, as well as being more active in giving feedback."

Source:  Blog post from the Financial Times, 18th November 2011

Google has activated over 200m Android devices

"Google shared some interesting statistics about its Android platform during the Google Music press conference held in Los Angeles on Wednesday. More than 200 million Android smartphones and other devices have been activated around the world. That's up from 100 million six months ago. That's an incredible amount of growth for a platform that didn't exist three years ago."

Source:  Information Week, 17th November 2011

Top 10 most Tweeted moments ever

As at 24th November 2011
(Rank - Event - Tweets per Second - Date)
"10 - Osama Bin Laden’s Death - 5,106 - 1st May 2011
9 - East Coast Earthquake - 5,449 - 23rd August 2011
8 - Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami - 5,530 - 14th March 2011
7 - Last Game of the 2011 NBA Finals - 5,531 - 12th June 2011
6 - UEFA Champions League (Final) - 6,303 - 28th May 2011
5 - 2011 BET Awards - 6,436 - 26th June 2011
4 - New Year’s Day, Japan - 6,939 - 1st January 2011
3 - Brazil Eliminated From Copa América - 7,166 - 17th July 2011
2 - FIFA Women’s World Cup - 7,196 - 17th July 2011
1 - Beyoncé Reveals Baby Bump - 8,868 - 28th August 2011"
Source:  BusinessInsider, 22nd November 2011

Spotify has 2.5m paying subscribers

"This week is Thanksgiving in the US. And we’ve got our own reasons to give thanks too.
Fanfare! Drum roll! Yes, we’re excited to announce that we’ve now welcomed 2.5 million paying subscribers to the service.
So we’d like to say a big thank you to all our subscribers, new and old. Keep spreading the good news about Spotify!
Of course, we’ll continue to focus on providing you with the best music service possible. We’ve got some exciting developments in the works, which we’ll share with you very soon."

Source:  Blog post by Spotify, 23rd November 2011

Earlier - 2m subscribers announced in September

Earlier - 1.5m subscribers announced in August 

More smartphones were shipped to China in Q3 2011 than to the US

"China has overtaken the U.S. as the largest market for smartphones by volume, according to one firm’s estimates.
Nearly 24 million smartphones were shipped to providers in China during the third quarter of 2011, compared to 23.3 million units in the U.S., data from Boston-based research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics suggests.The growth of China’s smartphone market has been significant, up 58% from just the previous quarter. Shipments of smartphones in the U.S. fell 7% from Q2 2011.
(Note the firm’s estimates only calculate the number of devices shipped, not sold, and that the U.S. still leads the market by smartphone revenue.)"
Source:  Mashable, 23rd November 2011

There are over 200,000 LEGO videos on YouTube, and over 1m LEGO photos on Flickr

"The book is full color, hardcover, with 304 pages. There are 12 chapters that cover topics such as: The History of LEGO, Minifig Mania and LEGO Art.
I love some of the tidbits included in the text, such as the fact that there are over 200,000 LEGO videos on YouTube! Wow, who knew? Now I want to go waste hours watching them  Or what about the over 1 million photos that are tagged with LEGO on Flickr?"

Source:  From a review of the book Cult of LEGO, on the site The Gadgeteer, 24th October 2011

(Does anyone have a better source for the stats..?)