Heading to any parties at DMA 2013? If so, read on for some fascinating facts and stats from Gian Fulgoni, executive chairman of comScore, to impress your interlocutors over ribs and Old Style.
For one, did you know that the most avid users of social networking are in Latin America? Ninety-four percent of Latin Americans regularly use some form of social. That’s higher than in the U.S., where only (only?) 88% of people are active on social networking sites. And Facebook makes up the lion’s share, despite some opinions to the contrary about its potentially waning popularity.
Facebook is the most used social networking site in the world; 80% of the total share of minutes spent social networking happens on Facebook. In Latin America it’s the number one social destination of choice; 99% of social activity in Latin America goes down via Facebook. Roughly 94% of the Middle East and Africa are on Facebook. Only 69% of Asia-Pac uses Facebook—the lowest percentage of Facebook users worldwide—but that’s still not a number to sniff at.
In fact, Facebook has established an even more dominant position for itself than Google’s been able to accomplish with search.
Now guess how many people view video on a monthly basis globally? The answer: 1.3 billion and growing, both in terms of viewers and the amount of content being viewed.
Speaking of the Internet-using world population, there’s about one and a half TRILLION (I feel justified in capping that) digital interactions every month—which, as you can imagine, generates a staggering amount of data.
The growth of Internet usage itself is fairly staggering in its scope. In 1996 the U.S. was basically the center of the digital universe; 66% of all Internet users resided there. By 2012 that number had dropped to 13%. Today Asia-Pac’s out front, with China in lead. There are 351 million monthly Internet accesses in China; in the U.S. that number’s at 196 million. Despite that, North America still has the heaviest usage, with 36 hours spent online per person per month.
Presumably the majority of that time is spent watching cat videos.
And that’s the digital world in focus.
