Stats: Worldwide blog count & daily web video views

On Monday I had the opportunity to talk to two groups about how understanding web 2.0 can help their organizations. The first group I spoke to were the good people at Katcher, Vaughn, and Bailey, a PR firm in Nashville (thanks for the invitation Steve). The second group was the marketing department and some editorial staff at Randall House, a publishing company here in town.

In both cases I gave an overview of the six categories of web 2.0...the "massive Volkswagon" acronym MASSVW. We also discussed some additional terms like RSS, wiki, AJAX, and tags. One of the things that seemed to get everyone's attention were some stats about blogs and online video. You may find them interesting too if you haven't seen any recently. Here's the breakdown on both with the data I had:

Worldwide Blogs Count (source Technorati)

• Jan. 2004 - less than 2 million
• Jan. 2005 - 6 million
• Jan. 2006 - 24 million
• July 2006 - 50 million
• Jan. 2007 - 60+ million

Online Video - Average number of views per day (source ComScore)

• Oct. 2005 - less than 25 million
• Jan. 2006 - 125 million
• July 2006 - 700 million

I haven't seen any more recent data than July 2006 but I wouldn't be surprised to see that Jan. 2007 online video views reached 1 billion per day.

So what does this mean for you? First, if you're not one of the 60 million bloggers you might want to consider starting one. Blog writers are blog readers and the number of people who will read your blog is higher now that it's ever been. Second, how are you using online video to help you? Are you creating opportunities for people to embed any video you put online? If you're not, you are missing a tremendous opportunity.

U.S. ranks sixth among global blog readers

There was an interesting post on Micro Persuasion today about the percentages of people from North America and Western Europe who read blogs. The post references the actual study done by comScore.

Below is the chart with the breakdown, but it's interesting to see that over half the online population in both Canada and Spain are blog readers. What surprised me most was that the U.S. was so far down the list coming in sixth behind the previously mentioned Canada and Spain as well as France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. I'm not entirely sure what the full missions implications are here, but it seems like an opportunity for America's churches taking mission trips to any of these countries to begin with a blog now...and this study even tells you the blogging platform you should use depending on the country.

My only other question now is how do some of the South American countries rank? I hear blogging is big in Brazil.