There are more than 800 online dating sites in the UK

"The UK market, with an estimated £120m a year in revenue, has more than 800 dating websites. Most fall into one of two camps – free-to-use sites that generate revenue through advertising and those that offer services by subscription such as Match, owned by the Nasdaq-listed IAC."
Source:  Financial Times, 10th February 2012

Pinterest has over 11m monthly visitors in the US

"It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.
In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland. Maybe we should call it blow-dryer growth.
According to comScore, the average Pinterest user spend 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. If you don’t count sites like Google+ or new Yahoo channels that have built in user bases, comScore’s data shows Pinterest would be the fastest site of any kind to hit 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S.
[Update: comScore reported to us that Pinterest was the fastest independent site to hit 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S., and that according to its data, Formspring never reached 10 million monthly active users in the U.S. and instead peaked around 8+ million."

Source:  TechCrunch, 7th February 2012

Tumblr gets 15bn page views a month

"At the Digitial Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich, Germany, Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp announced that the blogging site now reaches 120 million people and 15 billion pageviews every month.
According to The Next Web, Karp credited the site’s sociability for its growth. The average Tumblr blog is re-blogged nine times, said the founder, and the content is distributed through RSS, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platforms.
“There’s the spreadable future of social media,”  quipped journalist and professor Jeff Jarvis on Twitter.
That adds up to 560 million people who have viewed content on Tumblr to date. There are 249 million visitors in the U.S. alone, comprising 45% of Tumblr’s audience. Next in line are Brazil with 49 million visits and the UK with 34 million visits."

Source:  SocialTimes, 23rd January 2012

The demographics of American Pinterest users

"Pinterest’s growth over the past six months has been nothing short of astounding. We’ve noted this before, but some new data today from Hitwise confirms the trend. Last week, Pinterest attracted 11 million visits, up almost 40-fold from just six months ago. Pinterest is now one of the top 10 social networking sites Hitwise tracks.
[...]
Visitors tend to be female (58 percent), between 25 and 44 years old (59 percent). A lot of the visitors are from California and Texas, but Pinterest has mainstream appeal distributed across the middle of the country, with strong activity coming from Alabama, Tennessee, and Utah."

Source:  Data from Hiitwise, reported by TechCrunch, 22nd December 2011

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

Wordpress powers nearly 150,000 of the world's top million websites

"This has been an exciting year for WordPress. We’ve grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress."

Source:  Blog post by Wordpress, 19th August 2011

StumbleUpon drives more web traffic to other sites in the US than any other social media site

"For months, Facebook has been the biggest social media site that drives web traffic in the United States. Those days are over– for the moment, at least.
Web discovery engine StumbleUpon is now the biggest traffic driver among social media websites in the US, according to global web analytics service StatCounter. The company unseated Facebook at the top during June 2011, according to the latest StatCounter social media data. StatCounter tracks hits to over 3 million websites, and its social media data is gathered by analyzing every hit referred by a social media site."
Source:  GigaOm, 5th July 2011

Hulu has 875,000 paying subscribers

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"The slope of Hulu Plus’s subscriber ramp is higher than we previously forecasted. We just closed our biggest month in Hulu Plus paid subscriber net additions by a healthy margin; we added more paying subscribers in June than we did in April and May combined. [This] our month-end Hulu Plus paying subscriber numbers since we exited our private beta period in November 2010. In our first 7.5 months, we are fast approaching the 1 million paying subscriber milestone (we already have over a million when including those in a one-week free trial period). We anticipate exceeding 1 million paying subscribers before the end of this summer; previously we had forecasted crossing that threshold around the end of this year. We are extremely encouraged by the ramp of this business
We have always believed that our path towards creating a special company lay in our ability to delight our customers. The key to delighting content owners rests in the economics, and Hulu Plus is already revealing our ability to compensate content owners at the high end of the market for a given body of content. Today, we proudly and profitably pay the content community approximately $8 per subscriber per month for the content offering you see today on Hulu Plus. A portion of the $8 payment to the content community comes from our $7.99 subscription fee; the balance comes from the revenue we generate through advertising. As Hulu Plus increases in scale and scope, we believe significantly more dollars in aggregate will move to the content community than has historically been the case in the industry. These economics are made possible by our ability to thrive on low margins and the unusually effective Hulu advertising service we’ve built and will continue to innovate. A very positive trend for the content community."

Source:  Blog post by Hulu, 6th July 2011

Zynga has 232m monthly active users

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Source:  SEC filing by Zynga, 1st July 2011

In the retail sector, one extra Facebook fan aquired will drive an additional 20 visits to the main site over the course of the year

"We’ve been talking at Hitwise for a very long time about the benefits of social media and how Facebook in particular is becoming critical to the success of multi-channel marketing. We are constantly asked: “What’s the ROI with advertising on Facebook?”and until now that has always been a difficult question to qualify precisely. Leveraging our unique data sets we now have an answer: for retailers, each new fan acquired on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to your website over the course of a year.
[...]
Our data shows that for the top retailers, even if they have no Facebook fans they can still expect to receive on average 62,000 visits from Facebook each month. However, by utilising this new service, brands can more rapidly build a fan base within Facebook and therefore drive more traffic to their website. Within retail each new fan acquired will drive an additional 20 visits to a retailer’s websites, which in turn will generate extra sales both online and offline."
Source:  Data from Hitwise and Techlightenment, reported in Robin Goad's Hitwise blog, 23rd June 2011

There are more than 20m Tumblr blogs

"According to their respective websites, 4-year-old microblogging platform Tumblr now hosts more blogs than 8-year-old WordPress.com.
In January, Tumblr had more than 7 million individual blogs. At the time of this writing, the total blog ticker on its site read about three times that at 20,873,182 — beating out WordPress.com’s current count by about 85,000 blogs."

Source:  Mashable, 15th June 2011

Flipboard gets over 10m page views a day

"In the video above, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue makes the case that in tablet publishing, “the bulk of the revenue will come from advertising.” To make his point, he shares some recent numbers from Flipboard, which is seeing more than 10 million “flips per day”, up from 3 million two months ago. A “flip” in the app is like a pageview (in the video, he says 10 million flips per day, but later he checked the number and it is actually 11.4 million). Of the 2 million people who have downloaded the Flipboard app to their iPads, I’ve heard from other sources that about half are active, which would mean that on average each user flips through 10 pages a day."
Source:  Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, reported in TechCrunch, May 12th 2011

10% of website visits come from sharing

"ShareThis, the world’s largest platform for sharing and influence, today announced that it is releasing, in collaboration with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), the most comprehensive study of online social sharing to date. Conducted by former ARF Chief Research Officer, Joel Rubinson, the study paints a picture of an online behavior that, while still unexplored and untapped by many publishers and advertisers, is shaping the way users interact with each other and with content online. This study is the first in a series of studies as part of an ongoing partnership between ShareThis and SMG.
The study focuses on ShareThis’ database of sharing activity for the month of March 2011 and includes a detailed analysis of more than 7 billion sharing signals across all major sharing channels, specifically looking at the sharing patterns of more than 300 million monthly users across the top 1,000 publisher websites of ShareThis.
[...]
Sharing is bigger than fans, friends and followers. Sharing generates almost half of the traffic for websites and brands that is created by search — 10 percent of website visits come from sharing. Sharing also accounts for 31 percent of referral traffic.
Sharing is about scale, not virality. Shared links are, on average, across all sharing channels, clicked on 4.9 times each, so content shared by large groups of people reach a wider audience than content passed along from others.
Everyone who shares is an influencer if the subject is important to him or her. Instead of one person being universally influential on a wide range of topics, the study found that many people are influential on only one or two topics.
Sharing is about moments of opportunity and relevance. The study proves that sharing is a viable marketing solution for reaching audiences when they are most receptive to a particular category of advertising, such as CPG, Business & Financial Services, or Consumer Electronics."

Source:  Data from ShareThis and SMG, reported on the ShareThis blog, 6th June 2011

Interest in 'super injunctions' drove Twitter's UK traffic to it's highest ever levels

"Twitter had its highest ever peak in UK Internet visits yesterday (9 May 2011) due to the extraordinary revelations of the super injunction scandal, which exposed the identities of several high profile celebrities.
Visits to Twitter increased by 14% on 9 May, accounting for 0.49% of total Internet visits that day. Twitter also became the 17th most popular website in the UK yesterday, up from the rank of 19th on 8 May 2011. In the last week there were over 500 unique search term variations which included the word ‘super injunction’ typed into Google, Bing or Yahoo!. Searches for the term ‘super injunction’ have increased by 5000% in the last month, as stories surrounding the controversial topic have peaked curiosity in UK Internet users."

Source:  Analysis by Robin Goad of Experian Hitwise, in his blog, 10th May 2011

StumbleUpon gets one billion 'stumbles' a month

"In January, we reported that StumbleUpon had broken a new record with 27.5 million stumbles in one day. At the beginning of this month, we interviewed Marc Leibowitz, StumbleUpon’s VP of Marketing and Business Development who told us that since 2009, StumbleUpon has grown from 6 million to 15 million users. Recommendations have tripled, now surpassing 800 million every month. Each month, over 3-4 million users are active on StumbleUpon, with the primary base being in the US.
Today, they’ve just crossed a new threshold: 1 billion stumbles per month.  StumbleUpon is now driving billions of visitors to websites that have been “Stumbled.”"

Source:  TheNextWeb, 6th April 2011

The Huffington Post site now has more unique visitors than the Washington Post site

"In news that shows another seismic shift in the media landscape - this time online - the Huffington Post passed Washingtonpost.com in unique visitors in September, according to new data made available by Nielsen Online (via EditorandPublisher.com). Additional data about online news sites from the rankings:
The Huffington Post was up 26% year-over-year with 9.4 million uniques while the audience at Washingtonpost.com dropped nearly 30% to 9.2 million. HuffPo was not far behind USAToday.com, which had 9.9 million uniques.
Yahoo News (42.6 million uniques), CNN (38.2 million uniques), MSNBC (36.5 million uniques), AOL News (25.7 million uniques), and NYTimes.com topped the September list, with Huff Post at #15 and Washingtonpost.com at #16.
NYTimes.com expanded its audience by 7% to 21.5 million uniques in September, after several months of losses. The Examiner group of newspapers had the highest rate of growth in September, up 373% to 6.4 million uniques.
Nielsen warned, however, that year-over-year comparisons for these news sites should be viewed with caution. Since June, the company expanded its panel by eight times its previous number. Additionally, news events can often alter site audiences during a particular time period. Nielsen said this trending could affect some sites and should only be used directionally."
Source: Nielsen Online, reported by MarketingVox, 19th October 2009

Google accounts for 6% of al internet traffic globally

"Five years ago, Internet traffic was, for the most part, managed by tier 1 providers like AT&T, Verizon, Level 3 Communications, and Global Crossing, all of which connected to thousands of tier 2 networks and regional providers. Today, that has changed. Now, instead of traffic being distributed among tens of thousands of networks, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic. Among these new Internet superpowers, it's no surprise to find Google listed. In fact, the search giant accounts for the largest source (6%) of all Internet traffic worldwide.
This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990's."
Source: Arbor Networks report, cited by the New York Times, 13th October 2009
Note - In the original press release here it says that 30 large companies make up 30% of the traffic, and mentions Google and YouTube individually, so this 6% presumably refers to Google entities, and not owned services like YouTube and Blogger

YouTube now serves more than 1 billion video views a day

"Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you."
Source: YouTube founder Chad Hurley, writing on the YouTube blog, 9th October 2009

The furore surrounding Kanye West gave MTV.com it's second largest daily unique visits

"One day after 2.7 million unique visitors gave MTV.com its best VMA premiere day in the site's history, 5.5 millionpeople visited the site on Monday, September 14 to recap and experience more
from the "2009 MTV Video Music Awards," tying MTV.com's second-place record for unique visitors, all-time. The site saw 53.4 million page views, marking the second-highest day overall for the site. 17.9 million video streams were watched across the site on Monday, a whopping 64% increase from the day after the "2008 MTV Video Music Awards" and the second highest stream total in MTV.com's history."
Source: MTV press release, published by Reuters, 16th September 2009

Chinese site QQ generated approxmately 88% of it's revenues from value added services in 2008

Inside Tencent Presentation

View more documents from Benjamin Joffe.

"QQ made over $1bn in revenue in 2008, with 40% net margin
This came from approximately 8% of its active user base
$719m from online value added services
$205m from mobile value added services
$121m from advertising"
Source: Presentation from Plus 8 Star, August 2009, charts 11 & 17