The potential for Internet marketing continues to grow by leaps and bounds, even as Internet marketers compete for recognition and market share in a rapidly growing online environment.
In a retrospective look-back at the state of the Internet in 2010, the New York Times reports that, “(a)s of June 2010 there were 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide, with 825.1 million of them in Asia, 475.1 million in Europe and 266.2 million in North America.” That means that over one-quarter of the world’s population was already online by mid-2010, with that number continuing to surge at a 14% annual growth rate.
“Social media continues to grow at a fast pace,’ the Times also notes, which highlights the burgeoning opportunities that are available through social media marketing campaigns. Turning to the raw numbers compiled by Internet monitoring firm, Pingdom, the wholesale adoption of social media by Internet users is hugely apparent.
There are now 152 million blogs on the Internet, 600 million people on Facebook and 175 million people (as of September 2010) on the new social media darling, Twitter, Pingdom reports. Pingdom also reports that Facebook users generated some 30 billion separate pieces of content (links, notes and photos, etc.) per month, or nearly a half a trillion (trillion with a “t”) pieces of user-generated content per year.
Pingdom also notes that there were some 25 billion Tweets sent out by Twitter’s 175 million users (as of September 2010), a number that should climb exponentially given that Twitter added some 100 million new accounts in 2010.
ON the video end of the social media spectrum, users uploaded videos to YouTube at the astonishing rate of 35 hours per minute. Two billion videos are watched every day on YouTube, and over 2 billion videos a month are watched on Facebook.
The rapid and wholesale adoption of social media by the world’s 1.97 web citizens should set the hearts of Internet marketing professionals aTwitter (ouch!), yet competing for visibility in this wealth of content may be more difficult than ever. Pingdom notes that there were some 255 million websites at the end of 2010, with 21.4 million of those sites added in 2010 alone.