Internet statistics to blow your mind

I’m a bit of an internet statistics junkie – I actually enjoy checking the visitor stats for this site. When I send out an e-mail newsletter it interests me to see how many where opened and what content people found the most useful.

Mashable posted a great video on Friday that outlines some statistics on Internet use, and I wanted to share that with you here:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

There are some amazing numbers there: 81% of all e-mail is spam!? Thank goodness for spam filters. I was (for some reason) surprised to see that there are more Internet users in Europe than the US. I don’t know why, but I often think of the US as being the market to crack… but perhaps I’ve been ignoring European users. Of course, then there are the massive numbers in Asia to be considered too!

The huge amount of traffic Facebook receives is just mind blowing, although I can see why that would be the case given the social networking, applications and games offered there. That massive user base is one of the reasons Geek-Speak has a Facebook page too – you have to go where the people are if you want them to hear about you!

I’m also a bit surprised that just over half of all web pages are blogs, according to the video! If ever there was an indication of the massive take-up of blogging, that’s it. Sure, I guess a lot of those are failed or failing blogs (ones that the owner hasn’t written on for a long period of time) but it certainly shows there’s an interest in people setting up their own piece of blogging real-estate.

What went through your mind when you watched the video? Did anything surprise you? Is there anything you’d dispute? I’ve love to know what you think, so please leave a comment!

Free report: Blogging in 2010 and beyond

I’ve written about some of Mike Cliffe-Jones’ work before, as well as being a regular reader of his blog. Well, now Mike has teamed up with Nathan Hangen to write Beyond Blogging, a book that aims to take you behind the scenes with some A-list bloggers.

Mike and Nathan explain what the book is all about far better than I could, so here you go:

Beyond Blogging will take you behind the scenes to cut out the fluff that prevails in many books and Internet Marketing products. With well over 200 pages of actionable content, Beyond Blogging is expected to be the biggest blogging book of this decade.

As part of the launch of the book, there’s a free report on blogging in the next decade, which you can download here. There’s no obligation to buy the book afterwards, this is a totally free download.

Things have changed on the Internet – when I first really started getting into websites (1996) the pages were simple but it was fairly easy to carve out a niche for yourself. Later, when e-commerce really took off, it was fairly easy to make money too. Now there’s so much competition that it’s much more difficult to be “successful” online (however you define that). Mike and Nathan’s report explores the current climate, and how you can do well within it.

It’s well worth a read and it’s free. So why not?

Disclosure: Links to Beyond Blogging in this post are affiliate links. Should you decide to purchase the book I will earn a commission from your sale. However, I’d add again, the “Blogging in 2010 and beyond” is totally free and there’s no obligation to make a purchase at a later date.