Internet Statistics and Numbers

If the total worth of a company was to be divided among every employee, how much each person receive? With an amazingly huge cash in its coffers, it is no wonder that Google leads the pack in the cash per employee list. According to a study by the Silicon Alley Insider, every employee in Google is worth a whopping $1.4 million. Now compare this number with the worth of these employees just a couple of years back in 2008 when the value stood at $210,000 per employee!

Other companies in the top five list include Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Intel and this is the cash per employee for these companies.

Google : $1.38 million
Apple : $600,000
Microsoft : $410,000
Yahoo : $200,000
Intel : $170,000

The study notes a Google employee count of 21,805. Now, you can do the math for the company’s total worth.

It’s a no-brainer to say that Google leads the way by a huge margin in the search engine rankings. But considering that the mobile internet took off relatively later, one may have imagined that the rival search engines may have been able to compete more effectively against the big G on the mobile front.

Not so, according to a recent study published by Pingdom. According to their most recent report, Google dominates the mobile search engine market much more heavily than it does on the web front. Quite revealingly, less than 2% of mobile internet users make use of alternate search engines while that number is more than 9% in the case of web.

So how do the different players fare in the two markets? We will find out.

Web Search Engine Market
Google : 90.57%
Yahoo : 3.91%
Bing : 3.74%
Others : 1.78%

Mobile Search Engine Market
Google : 98.29%
Yahoo : 0.81%
Bing : 0.46%
Others : 0.46%

Social gaming has been become amazingly popular over the past year and a half with the launch of games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook. It is not exaggeration if I am going to say that the success of companies such as Zynga actually helped Facebook figure out a business model for their social networking services. Of course, Farmville today is not as popular as it once used to be. But while the shelf life of a social game is debatable, there is no question that social gaming has a future and that’s a bright one.

Screen Digest has conducted a study on the growth of social gaming and concludes that this “industry” could cross the $1 billion revenue mark as early as next year. With speculations about Google launching a Facebook rival that revolves primarily around social games, this number does not look too improbable.

Here are the estimated revenue figures from social gaming, according to a report by Screen Digest

2008 : $76 million
2009 : $639 million
2010 : $826 million
2011 : $1025 million
2012 : $1213 million
2013 : $1372 million
2014 : $1526 million

Akamai has released its latest report detailing the state of internet broadband across the world. Not surprisingly, south east asia, especially Japan and South Korea feature prominently in the list of countries with the fastest internet speeds. Akamai notes that of the top 100 cities in the world with fastest internet speeds, 59 are in Asia.

Here is how the fastest internet connections are distributed across the different countries. According to Akamai, over 20% of the internet connections worldwide can be termed high speed of over 5 Mbps.

South Korea : 65%
Japan : 60%
Romania : 48%
Hong Kong : 45%
Sweden : 42%
Latvia : 41%
Denmark : 41%
Netherlands : 40%
Canada : 34%
Belgium : 33%

Conspicuously absent in the top ten list are the countries from the developed world – USA and UK. United States though features at number 14 with close to 25% of internet connections in USA at a speed of over 5Mbps.

Facebook has reached 500 million users – You learnt about this either on news, or from the newspapers (if you read one) or on one of your favorite blogs or from Facebook.com itself. So where have these million of new users come from? According to an article on the O’Reilly blog, Africa is the fastest growing region – with a 21% growth rate. Meanwhile, Asia presents the most growth potential moving forward with just a 2.3% penetration at present.

Here is the market share of active Facebook users from the different geographies

North America : 32.5%
Europe : 27.5%
Asia : 17.1%
South America : 9.2%
Middle East/North Africa : 8.5%
Oceania : 2.3%
Africa : 1.6%
Central America/Caribbean : 1.3%

Also Read
Top Ten Countries on Facebook
Facebook Traffic Ranking By Country

Apple has reported extremely impressive results for the last quarter. The most critical pointer is that the company’s revenue is no longer dependent on just three major products. Instead, with the iPad, there is a comfortably big fourth product. So much of the revenues does each of these four products contribute?

Here is a breakdown of the revenues earned from these devices

iPhone : 40%
Mac : 33%
iPad : 16%
iPod : 11%

These are not the sole revenue earners. The revenues from iTunes was close to $1 billion and those from the sale of other hardware and software was close to $2 billion, much close to what the iPad brought.

Most interestingly, Apple revenues are reported to be $15.7 billion that is slightly more than what Microsoft is expected to announce shortly – $15.27 billion

Do you think the tides have turned against Microsoft?

The mobile ad market has been growing at a quick pace. According to a report by eMarketer, the mobile advertising market is poised to reach $593 million. A study by MediaMind concludes that mobile banners comprehensively outdo standard banners when it comes to click throughs and conversion rates. In their study of automotive ads, MediaMind found that the CTR on mobile banners was 0.21% – nearly double the 0.10% that was noticed on standard banners. These numbers are of course much lower than the industry-best observed for floating ads (2.31%) and commercial breaks (1.98%).

So how does the conversion rate on mobile banners fare? Again, the study found out that the conversion rate on mobile banners was nearly double the conversion rate on standard banners. Here is the average conversion rate on the various kinds of display ads as reported in the MediaMind study

Floating ad : 1.09%
Wallpaper ad : 0.49%
Mobile banners : 0.44%
Expandable Banners : 0.41%
Polite banners : 0.37%
Commercial Break : 0.23%
Standard banner : 0.22%

Is email as a marketing medium losing its sheen? For quite some time, email marketing has been one of the cheapest and most effective medium to catch up with customers. However,as a recent study from MailerMailer has shown, the average email open rates and email click through rates may be on the decline.

The study points out that email open rates were especially low in four industries – Entertainment (9.2%), Banking (8.2%), Marketing (7.4%) and Medical (7.3%). Click through rates, on the other hand have seen a drop of nearly 43% in the past one year. The study puts the average click through rate on emails at 1.6%.

Here is how the open rates have fared over the past few years

H2 2007 : 14%
H1 2008 : 13.2%
H2 2008 : 12.5%
H1 2009 : 12%
H2 2009 : 11.2%

Here is the correponding change in click through rates

H2 2007 : 2.9%
H1 2008 : 2.7%
H2 2008 : 2.8%
H1 2009 : 2.6%
H2 2009 : 1.6%

Mobile phones, and I am speaking not just about smartphones, are increasingly being used to serve non-voice applications. Today, it is pretty commonplace to substitute your camera, alarm clock, watch and MP3 player with your cell phone.

According to a study by Pew Internet, the number of people using a mobile phone to take pictures has increased by 10 percentage points in just the past one year. A similar increase in usage is also being noticed on other common non-voice activities like internet access, playing music and video recording.

Here is a list of non-voice data applications on mobile phones and the percentage of survey respondents who claimed to have used the feature. The responses are from May 2010. Corresponding responses from April 2009 are offered in brackets

Take picture : 76% (66%)
Send/Receive SMS : 72% (65%)
Play Game : 34% (27%)
Send/Receive Email : 34% (25%)
Access Internet : 38% (25%)
Play Music : 33% (21%)
Send/Receive IM : 30% (20%)
Record Video : 34% (19%)

Pew Internet & American Life Project has published a fresh study that looks into the mobile phone adoption and usage trends among Americans. The study has concluded that non-Hispanics continue to be the race that is least likely to own a mobile phone. Their penetration lies at 80%.

Close to 60% of Americans now use the mobile web. Young adults in the 18-29 age group lead the pack in mobile web usage while the 30-49 group are more likely to use the basic functions like sending text message.

The study measures the mobile phone ownership penetration among adult Americans as follows

Non-Hispanic Blacks : 87%
Non-Hispanic White : 80%
Hispanic : 87%

All adults : 82%