There’s a lot that we all do online and when start collecting stats over time and by total users in the US, the stats are rather impressive.  We’ll look at the soon, but first, here’s a simple list of things we all, including your children, do online.
- Post video from mobile devices
- Build online profiles
- Text from mobile devices
- Create accounts in Social Media and game sites
- Connect with friends online
- Send photos to friends
- Broadcast activities to many people
- Socialize
Nielsen did a study a couple years ago showing the percent change in time of use of different categories of online use categories. Granted this is from June of 2009 to June of 2010, but that data is very interesting. I haven’t seen this exact study done more recently in this way, but I would expect the trend is probably still continuing. Obviously, number 1, Social Networks is a pretty impressive growth at 43% in 1 year.
More recently, a really impressive study was done by Mashable and a really interesting graphic created from the data about what happens on the internet in 1 minute. A few of the interesting stats for 1 minute of internet activity include:
- YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video.
- Email users send 204,166,667 messages
- Instagram users share 3,600 new photos
- Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content
- Twitter users send over 100,000 tweets
- Apple receives about 47,000 downloads from the app store
- Google receives over 2,000,000 search queries
- The mobile web receives 217 new users
These are all fairly impressive stats and in some ways is rather boggling – especially when you consider your children having some part in all of this. Honestly the most impressive one for me is the YouTube video piece. That’s 69,120 hours of video uploaded per day to YouTube. And this to a website that has virtually no parental controls at all. This is why YouTube must be monitored. If you’re not careful, your child can be searching for videos of Elmo in Grouchland and end up with videos of breast exams or worse. This is one of my biggest beefs with Google, that they don’t rate or restrict videos. But, I also understand that monitoring almost 70,000 hours of video each day is a rather daunting, if not impossible, task. But, if anyone can do it, Google can…
So, check out the graphic online here and then think about all the different ways your child can interact with the internet in every minute of every day.