Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recently said that users post 400 million tweets per day. (How many is that per second?) Earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that iTunes customers had downloaded over 40 billion iOS apps. (How many more will have been downloaded by the time you finish this sentence?)
If you'd like to track stats from your favorite social sites and tech giants, there's a fun tool that'll show you how fast shared items, profits and sales stack up in the virtual world. It's called Gary's Social Media Count, a Flash-based app that presents a live stream of by-the-second stats from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple and other popular companies. For example, since I've been writing this post, 202 seconds have passed; in that time, the counter tells me that 164 hours have been uploaded onto YouTube and over 350,000 Tweets have been shared via Twitter.
The counter tool also tracks miscellaneous data, like the number of iPad and Samsung phones sold per second, as well as the number of emails sent worldwide and the number of hours watched on Netflix. You can check out these data by clicking the tabs in the top right corner of the app. (The buttons are categorized into "mobile," "games," and "heritage" statistics. The mobile tab gives an overview of the phone market, while the games tab illustrates the online gaming world with statistics from video games like "World of Warcraft." Finally, the heritage button takes users to a list showing the money spent and lost within the entertainment industry, including DVD sales and money made by print advertisements.)
The app was relatively simple to make, according to its creator, Gary Hayes, an executive producer at the Australia Broadcasting Company. Hayes wrote on his blog that he "quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites" in 2009. The design has been "finessed" and is in "constant development."
Here are some interesting statistics from June 2012, Hayes sources on his blog:
- There are 3.2 billion likes and comments on Facebook daily.
- Nearly 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily.
- Instagram has 58 pictures uploaded per second.
- Twitter users send 175 million tweets daily.
How many items were shared on Facebook since you started reading this post? Look below at the social media counter for current statistics. Click the "embed" button in the bottom left hand corner to share the app for yourself.