Numbers In The News
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 5:20 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
Maybe it’s the result of following lots of statistics over a long period of time, but several released recently were really surprising.
According to a comScore press release, there are now nearly 700 million unique Internet users around the globe. Even in today’s technologically advanced world, that’s an enormous number.
A quick, but probably silly, calculation can get you an idea of just how large. If you got a dollar from one-tenth of one percent of each of them, your bank account would be $700,000 larger. About half what Brin and Page each banked from recent Google stock sales, but still a helluva lot of money.
Of course, in order to have a hope of getting that money you’d probably have to learn some new languages. But maybe not.
In the U.S. the Internet population is around 152 million, while in China the report states there are just shy of 75 million. (That’s about 25%-30% lower than figures widely reported elsewhere, but under the circumstances it may be difficult to get an accurate count.) Lots of Chinese read English, especially those that use the Internet.
But they’re not the only ones. Most Internet users in Europe do as well. For some reason the report doesn’t aggregate the figures for the EU. But just adding the UK, Germany, France, and Italy together — all very savvy online buyers — comes to over 100 million. (The total for all of EU combined is over 200 million.)
One of the more surprising numbers from the study is the amount of hours per month spent online by users in various countries. Israel came in first at over 57 hours per month. Most Israelis speak, write, and read English quite well.
Finland wasn’t too far behind at 49.3 hours per month, and South Korea clocked in just after at 47.2 hours per month. I don’t know what the percentage of English readers in South Korea is, but I’d estimate it’s similar to the Chinese.
Ok, now for the punchline.
A recent study by The Radicati Group put the number of daily (yes, daily) email messages at 171 billion, with over 70% of those identified as spam. That’s a 26.7% rise just since the end of 2005.
I have to think there’s another kind of number to be made out of all this. In some countries it’s preceded by one of these: $, €, £.
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