Internet stats

Technical people think all numbers should be knowable. How many guitar players are there? How many CDs will The Alternate Routes sell in 2009? What percentage of the U.S. has more than one mobile phone? Sometimes we can get the number we need from an analyst service; sometimes we'll have to make an educated guess.

If you need 'em, here are some amazing stats on the internet. Some of my favorites:

• 1.3 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 210 billion – The number of emails sent per day in 2008.
• 70% – The percentage of emails that are spam.
• 53.8 trillion – The number of spam emails sent in 2008 (assuming 70% are spam).

• 186,727,854 – The number of websites on the Internet in December 2008.
• 31.5 million – The number of websites added during 2008.
• 1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).

Read Internet 2008 in Numbers for more stats.

As for www.pragmaticmarketing.com and www.productmarketing.com, we have some good stats too:

• We had visitors from 308,000 different IP addresses
• 21,000 downloads of our magazines (all issues)
• 13,000 downloads of my e-book, The Strategic Role of Product Management
• 12,000 attendees to webinars

For our customers, 25% use IE7; 20% use Firefox. So I guess we better make sure we support both browsers. But Windows 95 users are 0.03% of our customers so we don't have to worry too much about that operating system. Win95 machines probably work on our websites but we're not going to test it or work to ensure it.

Numbers are often difficult to acquire. Look for secondary research like this to help you make product decisions. Or check the stats of your own website.