The 2012 Web By Numbers

Here are some amazing numbers regarding the world's Internet use in 2012 courtesy of Pingdom. These numbers will make your head spin if you're not careful, but they just go to show how much being online is part of everyone's lives all over the world.

Internet users

• 2.4 billion – Number of Internet users worldwide.
• 1.1 billion – Number of Internet users in Asia.
• 519 million – Number of Internet users in Europe.
• 274 million – Number of Internet users in North America.
• 255 million – Number of Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 167 million – Number of Internet users in Africa.
• 90 million – Number of Internet users in the Middle East.
• 24.3 million – Number of Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
• 565 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
• 42.1% – Internet penetration in China.

 Web pages, websites, and web hosting

• 634 million – Number of websites (December).
• 51 million – Number of websites added during the year.
• 43% – Share of the top 1 million websites that are hosted in the U.S.
• 48% – Share of the the top 100 blogs that run WordPress.
• 75% – Share of the top 10,000 websites that are served by open source software.
• 87.8 million – Number of Tumblr blogs.
• 17.8 billion – Number of page views for Tumblr.
• 59.4 million – Number of WordPress sites around the world.
• 3.5 billion – Number of webpages run by WordPress viewed each month.
• 37 billion –  Number of pageviews for Reddit.com in 2012.
• 35% – The average web page became this much larger during 2012.
• 4% – The average web page became this much slower to load during 2012.
• 191 million – Number of visitors to Google Sites, the number 1 web property in the U.S. in November.

Domain names

• 246 million – Number of domain name registrations across all top-level domains.
• 104.9 million – Number of country code top-level domain name registrations.
• 329 – Number of top level domains.
• 100 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2012.
• 14.1 million – Number of .net domain names at the end of 2012.
• 9.7 million – Number of .org domain names at the end of 2012.
• 6.7 million – Number of .info domain names at the end of 2012.
• 2.2 million – Number of .biz domain names at the end of 2012.
• 32.44% – Market share for GoDaddy.com, the biggest domain name registrar in the world.
• $2.45 million – The price for Investing.com, the most expensive domain name sold in 2012.

Email

• 2.2 billion – Number of email users worldwide.
• 144 billion – Total email traffic per day worldwide.
• 61% – Share of emails that were considered non-essential.
• 4.3 billion – Number of email clients worldwide in 2012.
• 35.6% – Usage share of the most popular email client, which was Mail for iOS.
• 425 million – Number of active Gmail users globally, making it the leading email provider worldwide.
• 68.8% – Percentage of all email traffic that was spam.
• 50.76% – Percentage of all spam that was about pharmaceuticals, the top category of all spam.
• 0.22% – Share of worldwide emails that comprised some form of phishing attack.

There's even more information where that came from. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming up.

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Music Pirates Buy More Songs

The music industry has been blaming piracy on decreasing sales forever, but it just might be that they were more off-base than anyone thought. A new study from Columbia University called Copy Culture In The US And Germany has determined that frequent users of P2P "piracy" networks in the US actually legitimately buy 30 percent more music than their non-stealing counterparts.

Of course this hasn't been the first study that points this out, but each one is immediately shot down by the RIAA as flawed. The problem is that we all know somebody that's such a music freak that they have to either have the latest release or something that no one else is hip to yet, even if that means they have to download it illegally. Of course, kids with no money tend to steal music, but they wouldn't have bought it in the first place anyway.

Some other points from the study include:

• Nearly half the population in the US and Germany (46% US; 45% DE) has copied, shared, or “downloaded for free” music, movies, and TV shows. 

• Much of this activity is casual and small scale. In both countries only 14% of adults have acquired most or all of a digital music or video collection this way. Only 2%–3% got most or all of a large collection this way (>1000 songs or >100 movies / TV shows).

• Copy culture tracks strongly with youth. Among adults under 30 in both countries, around 70% copy, share, or download media for free (70% US; 71% DE). In the US 27% in this age group acquired most or all of their digital music/video collections this way, and 10% acquired most or all of a large collection this way. In Germany the corresponding numbers are 33% and 7%.

• In both countries offline “private copying”—copying for personal use or sharing with family and friends—is comparable in scale to online file sharing. In the US, private copying and online file sharing contribute roughly equal shares to the average digital music collection: 22%–23% among those under 30. In Germany, online file sharing contributes more to average collection size (34%, versus 18% for private copying among those under 30) but less when controlling for collection size (17% for downloading; 25% for private copying). Put differently, most Germans copy more than they download.

• Copying and online file sharing are mostly complementary to legal acquisition, not strong substitutes for it. There is no significant difference in buying habits between those who copy or file share and those who do not. 

• P2P file sharers, in particular, are heavy legal media consumers. They buy as many legal DVDs, CDs, and subscription media services as their non-file-sharing, Internet-using counterparts.  In the US, they buy roughly 30% more  digital music. They also display marginally higher willingness to pay.

• In Germany much of this copying is legal under the “private copy” provisions of copyright law, which carve out a space for noncommercial personal uses, including passing copies to family and friends. This exemption does not extend to downloading or to copies made from “evidently unlawful public sources.”

• In the US little to none of this private copying is presumed legal, and much of it is now subject—in law if rarely in practice—to high criminal penalties.

Here's one last piece from the study that may be the most important; pirating and copying is declining as streaming music use climbs. Why steal it when it's always at your fingertips?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Making Money From YouTube

Believe it or not, there is some real money being made from YouTube views, although it may not be coming from where you think.

A s a general rule of thumb, record labels make around 40% of any ad revenue generated from a song, and this can increaseby another 20%  if it can prove ownership of the video (the "official" version). This amounts to around $5,000 per million views. Now how much of that is getting passed on to the artist is another story, but some labels actually split it 50/50 while others are........not so generous.

But there's a way for a songwriter/artist to cash in without worrying about the label getting in the middle. If a person covers your song in a video or uses it as the underscore for a video, that still requires a publishing sync license. The artist can claim the ad revenue from any video that uses their song. Doing that isn't always that easy, though, as you either have to search manually for the cover or use a company like INGrooves, which uses audio fingerprinting to crawl YouTube to find those than are using your material.

That's where everything changes though. Where once a time an artist would send a take-down notice, now they just ask for any ad revenue generated. If the person who posted the video doesn't want to take the video down, he'll leave the ads in (or put them in if they weren't there before). Of course, many record labels continue to issue take-downs, still not hip to the new revenue stream that could be.

Oh, and if you happen to right a song about a car crash, an insurance company that uses your video may generate 5 to 7 times more than the norm, so keep branding in mind (someone else's, that is) when you're writing those songs. It can mean a chunk of change in your pocket.

You can read more about INGrooves and YouTube monetization on this in a great article in the Guardian.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

So Much For Europe's Record Stores

Maybe this is just Europe catching up to the US, or maybe it's the beginning of the final gasp of the last era of music business, but all over the continent the last of the record store chains are closing.

The famous HMV retail chain in England recently went into bankruptcy, with the fate of all of its 200 stores now in doubt. Workers there recently went on strike demanding unpaid wages from the chain.

In France, the same happened at the 26 Virgin Megastores, and the FNAC chain in Italy was recently sold to private equity investors who are expected to shut stores and cut jobs.

To say the least, things do not look good on the CD/DVD retail front.

Soon the store closings become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people who genuinely want to buy a CD can't because there's not a retail store open near them. This is certainly the case in the US, where their are major cities without a single CD retail outlet.

That being said, CDs are still a big business, as people do buy them online and at concerts and gigs. In fact, there were 326 million CDs sold in 2011 (it's too early for the 2012 tallies yet) that we know of. I say that because a lot of CDs are sold privately at gigs or online that Soundscan never sees, so aren't included in the totals.

Still, you can see the writing on the wall. Anyone who has experienced the convenience of digital music just doesn't want to go back. And with hi-res digital music coming more and more available, the increase in quality will leave CD lovers in the dust.

Of course the business model of selling CDs is the thing that record labels, artists and publishers alike grieve over, but let's face it, that ship has already sailed.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

A Look At The New Mega File Sharing Site

It's interesting that every time the world of piracy seems to calm down a bit, in a flash something new surges it ahead. Thus is the case with the new file sharing site called Mega created by Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom.

Megaupload was one of the top file hosting sites in the world but was shut down by the US Department of Justice in January of 2012 for copyright infringement. At that point, Dotcom promised he was working on something new that would be a foolproof way around any of the legalities that typical file sharing sites face. Now that Mega has launched, we'll soon see about the claim.

It's already been alleged that Mega is the most private, invincible file sharing service ever created, and here's why. Everything you upload is encrypted locally. When you generate a download link, it contains the decryption code that you need to unravel the file. Mega can't be prosecuted for anything illegally posted because they don't have the decryption key and therefore can't look at the contents of the file. Only you have that. Plus, when you agree to the terms and conditions for using the service, you agree to absolve Mega from anything that you might do that could violate a law somewhere.

This is the difference between Mega and other cloud services, or even Facebook for that matter. They all have access to your data and can readily see what it is. Since it's encrypted on Mega, the only person that can view it is the user and whomever he gives the decryption key to.

Here's what it means to any creator of copy-written material. Kim Dotcom is going to make a lot of money from advertising on his site, and you'll see none of it while your material is being illegally distributed the world over. And it looks like there's nothing you can do about it.

Once again, if you're a musician, just go with it and don't give it a second thought. Remember, your music is your marketing. If you're just starting out, feel privileged that someone thinks so highly of your music that they'd want to steal it and share it with their friends. It's okay if the word about you is getting out. If you're an established artist, you know that you make most of your income from touring, merch and licensing anyway. View it as publicity.

Either way, it looks like Kim Dotcom has outsmarted everyone this time. Plus, the service seems like a real bargain. The basic user gets 50Gb for free to start, and up to 4Tb for only $39.99 a month. Demand has been so high that the site is currently offline as it works to overcome the overload.

You can read more about it on Gizmodo.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.