Email

• 1.3 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 210 billion – The number of emails sent per day in 2008.
• 70% – The percentage of emails that are spam.
• 53.8 trillion – The number of spam emails sent in 2008 (assuming 70% are spam).

Websites

• 186,727,854 – The number of websites on the Internet in December 2008.
• 31.5 million – The number of websites added during 2008.

Web servers

• 24.4% – The growth of Apache websites in 2008.
• 13.7% – The growth of IIS websites in 2008.
• 22.2% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2008.
• 336.8% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2008.
• 100.3% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2008.

Domain names

• 77.5 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2008.
• 11.8 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2008.
• 7.2 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2008.
• 174 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains.
• 19% – The increase in the number of domain names in 2008.

Internet users

• 1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).

• 578,538,257 – Internet users in Asia.
• 384,633,765 – Internet users in Europe.
  
• 248,241,969 – Internet users in North America.
• 139,009,209 – Internet users in Latin America/Caribbean.
• 51,065,630 – Internet users in Africa.
• 41,939,200 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,204,331 – Internet users in Oceania/Australia

Blogs

• 133 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by Technorati).
• 900,000 – The number of new blog posts in a day.
• 329 million – The number of blog posts in 2008.

Images

• 10 billion – Photos hosted by Facebook (October 2008).
• 3 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (November 2008).
• 6.2 billion – Photos hosted by Photobucket (October 2008).

Videos

• 12.7 billion – The number of online videos watched by American Internet users in a month (November 2008).
• 87 – The number of online videos viewed per month per Internet user in USA.
• 34% – The increase in viewing of online video in USA compared to 2007.
• 3.1 – The number of minutes of an average online video.

Original post is from here

Tags: internet

To continue the theme of 2009 trends, I want to share some of the web design trends that interest me.

Out-of-the-box layouts: it’s an old trend. Being unique and innovation always win. The hard part of having a out-of-the-box layout is how the uniqueness of one particular design can be tied with the business success as well. You can have a great and very different design, which might not generate any business results (if it’s a business oriented website :).

More white space than ever: as people understand more about web layout, people should value the white space more. It’s the “breathing” space, that gives your own design enough space to express the main idea. It also gives customers enough space to navigate freely and comfortably.

Social design elements: more buttons or links (like Twitter, Dig, Facebook…) to help people share and communicate with friends within their existing page flow.

Speaking navigation: this technique helps to make the navigation more meaningful to users by explicitly explaining what one particular navigation section is about. In stead of having a navigation button as “works”, it can be “See what other projects we have done”.

Dynamic tabs: the more meaningful interaction with the user, the better a site can serve the user need. Once a user moves mouse over a tab, it expands to have more content/actions. It’s basically “interaction on-demand”.

Author icons: not sure since when, but having a real person’s image next to some content seems to be more trust worthy. And it also adds more social & human factors into the page.

When it comes to real one web site design, it’s the fun and challenge to put some or all of these things together to make it work.

See orginal post from SmashMagzine

Tags: design, trend

It’s the year of change. Internet is at the center of all the changes. Omaba represents all the possible bigger changes from all perspectives. I can’t wait to see more exciting things / changes to come online.

“The Internet has not seen anything like it until yesterday with the inauguration of the new President, Barack Obama. Internet traffic hit a record high - slowing, but not crippling the Internet. Online traffic to view live video streams of the big event spiked so high that the Internet’s top 40 sites slowed by as much as 60 percent when the ceremony started at 11 a.m. according to Keynote Systems.” (from WebGuild)

And, “at precisely 9:01 AM PST, after President Barack Obama took the oath of office, the Government of the United States of America launched a new Website for the White House, which is the official office and residence of the President of The United States of America.” (from WebGuild)

Most of the social media sites have participated in Obama’s campaign. The two sites - change.gov and the new one whitehouse.gov - are all well designed and full of social media tools. This is so exciting!

Tags: internet, obama, social media

I ran into this little beatufiful movie - beautiful song, quiet scene and full of life

lost in a moment from dennis wheatley on Vimeo.

Tags: lost in a moment, movie, video

Based on Hitwise’s finding, “the weekly market share of visits to coupon websites increased 15% from the previous year during the week of Thanksgiving & Black Friday and also increased 16% during the week of Cyber Monday. Overall, visits to the custom category of 70 websites increased 17% and 12%, in November and December, respectively, as compared to the previous year.”

It’s more interesteting that “many shoppers are looking for coupons from a specific retailer or brand, suggesting that many coupon searchers may be further along in the purchasing funnel and are close to making the purchase - but may need some type of final incentive. For the week ending December 27, 2008, 69% of the searches for the top 300 search terms that include ‘coupons’ also included a specific brand such as Pizza Hut, JCPenney, or Target. The other 31% of searches to include the term ‘coupons’ were generic in nature, seeking out grocery coupons, online coupons, and free printable coupons.”

Here is the original Hitwise post

Tags: coupon, deals, shopping

Here is the story that my friend just shared with me. It’s a story that teaches us about web marketing & cross channel marketing 101 in a different way:

Friday morning (assuming Friday is a good and imprtant day for ecommerce), around 9am. She got an email from OldNavy saying that there is a big sale with promo code. Great- she went ahead and clidked on the link in the email. Here is what she saw from OldNavy:

So, I went further and found out the other two stores Gap & BananaRepublic are also down:

Wow! That’s great - a great story to learn about web marketing 101: your development effort really needs to understand customer buying behavior, especially ecommerce sites. Your site simply shouldn’t be unavailable during a popular shopping time, no matter it’s scheduled site maintenance or just crunching high traffic holiday time.

and a great lesson about cross channel marketing: your Email campaign efforts should match/coordinate with your web channel efforts. Otherwise, it’s a waste of money and no performance will be generated from any campaign.

Update: and OldNavy, Gap and BananaRepublic should check out all these angry VOC from some deal forum

Tags: cross channel marketing, web marketing

Some helpful information that I found from Anderson Analytics’s survey:

Good to Great remained the most widely read and most recommended book. However, several new books appeared on the reading list this year including: Groundswell, Hot Flat and Crowded, The Black Swan, Predictably Irrational, Mavericks at Work, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, The Art of the Start, Purple Cow, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and Our Iceberg is Melting.

The number-one business Guru last year, Seth Godin, remained the favorite marketing guru for 2009, according to the survey. However, Warren Buffet and Malcolm Gladwell increased significantly in popularity and now occupy the #2 and #3 spots on the list, respectively. Jim Stengel also made the Marketing Guru list for the first time this year.

“This year we saw an increase in importance in several areas, not just ‘customer satisfaction’ and ‘retention,’” said Tom H.C. Anderson, managing partner of Anderson Analytics. “There were also significant increases in the importance of marketing concepts such as ‘CRM,’ ‘data mining’, and  ‘leading through analytics.’ That together with interest in books like The Black Swan and optimism on market research budgets signals marketing executives realize that in a down economy, it’s even more important to utilize information efficiently and keep the customers you have.”

About the survey: Anderson Analytics conducted the Marketing Trends 2009 Survey among 643 current MENG members between Nov. 15 and Dec. 2, 2008. Anderson Analytics used text-mining software to code open-ended/free form text answers to questions in order to understand what issues were top-of-mind.

Tags: books, marketing

As an active online shopper, I found it interesting to see the overall consumer shopping trends:

• Overall, only 51% of consumers visited a department store this holiday season, compared with 73% who visited Wal-Mart
• nearly 25% of consumers reported that they visited Macy’s less in 2008 than 2007, while only 7% visited Macy’s more
• Nearly 20% of consumers spent more than a year ago, while 54% reported spending less
• For the first time in the nine-year history of the study, the primary driver was price over selection as the reason for why customers changed the store where they purchased
• For the first time in many years, Wal-Mart was more effective in attracting new customers than Target

More data points are from MarketingChart.com

Tags: consumer, shopping, trends