Which Image Site Gets A Billion Pageviews A Day?

Well, we would never have guessed this one. One reason: we never knew this was so big. We spotted this today:

“Imgur gets one billion image views per day, up 1,200 percent from a year ago. A typical visitor looks at 11 pages per session.
Imgur (pronounced “imager”) was started by Alan Schaaf when he was an Ohio University undergrad. It’s not a photography site. The images it hosts are a mix of photos that have been manipulated in Photoshop, drawings, screenshots and memes.

The only time Imgur has ever been in the red, Schaaf said, was the $7 he paid for its domain. Since then the site has cost all sorts of money, but it has stayed ahead through advertising, donations and pro accounts, and keeps itself running with the help of EdgeCast’s content delivery network.”

Statistics Source: AllThingsD

How do we digest this number? Well, many people might be digesting this number right now, images are huge – this could easily be the next Instagram.

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Howcast Reaches 1 Billion Views

Content, generally, is king. We spotted this today:

“Howcast has another big announcement, too. The reference content site has reached one billion total views.

Having a wide variety of videos no doubt increases the site’s page view number. “Everything we do is inherently niche,” Cofounder and CEO Jason Liebman told Mashable.

There are some videos that have become super popular, like videos teaching people how to ‘Dougie’ or decorate a cake, which he said typically get a lot of views. Also helping: the site produces 1,000 videos per month and has a video library featuring around 15,000 ‘how to’ videos.”

Statistics Source: Mashable

How do we digest this number? Well, let us look at the king of them all, YouTube.

” In January 2012, YouTube stated that the figure had increased to four billion videos streamed per day.[16]”

Statistics Source: Wikipedia

Wrong comparison !

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10% Of All Web Traffic Comes From Mobile Devices

We had spotted mobile internet stats and mcommerce stats before. We spotted this today:

“In the U.S., 7.96% of all Web traffic comes from mobile devices, according to data from StatCounter. That includes smartphones, tablets, and other connected hardware, such as laptops with mobile broadband access. StatCounter’s data shows that mobile Web use is increasing quickly, especially in developing regions where mobile phones vastly outnumber desktop computers.
For example, the percentage of mobile Web traffic in Asia climbed from 6.1% to 17.84% between 2010 and 2012, an increase of 192%. The percentage of mobile Web traffic in Africa climbed from 5.81% to 14.85% between 2010 and 2012, an increase of 156%. Every region saw increased mobile traffic, with South America falling in last place with 2.86%.”

Statistics Source: InformationWeek

We had also spotted some patent statistics related to this, proving that mobile is in a lot of ways, the future.

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Facebook: Will The Market Value It At 96 Billion?

We had written multiple articles on Facebook valuation – we had spotted the issues with Facebook valuation as well. As the IPO date nears, Facebook is facing big issues around convincing the market on its valuation numbers. For example, it has been forced to declare that mobile is a problem area. We spotted this today:

“Facebook today amended its S-1 filing with the SEC to emphasize how the shift of its users to mobile devices is hurting what it can charge for ads, threatening its long-term revenue.
Facebook has already highlighted that it so far has no way to monetize its growing number of mobile users, and today’s additions to the document reiterate that issue.”

Statistics Source: CNet News

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Facebook IPO: Valuation Multiple Higher Than 99 Percent of S&P 500

We have written multiple posts on Facebook valuation – we had one in-depth analysis of the issues with Facebook valuation. We spotted this today:

“Facebook Inc. (FB) is betting its growth prospects will persuade investors to pay 99 times earnings for its initial public offering, a higher multiple than 99 percent of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

The high end of the proposed valuation would make Facebook more costly than every member of the S&P 500 relative to earnings except for Amazon.com Inc., Leucadia National Corp. and Equity Residential, data show. While 27-year-old Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has amassed more than 900 million users since starting Facebook in 2004, his challenge is to stem slowing sales growth amid increasing competition from Google Inc. (GOOG) and Twitter Inc.”

Statistics Source: Bloomberg

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Y Combinator Statistics: $7.8 Billion In Total Value Created

We had spotted some interesting stats on Y Combinator before – receiving an application every minute and a value of 4.7 billion by 2010 – . We spotted this today:

“The top incubator in our analysis is Y Combinator. When taking into account the 172 companies that have been acquired, shut down or raised funding, the total value is $7.78 billion, for an average of $45.2 million per company. It’s a remarkable figure, considering the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm has been in existence for seven years.”

Statistics Source: Forbes

Remarkable indeed. Remember those stunning Instagram stats?

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The Problem With Felix Salmon

Felix Salmon wrote an opinion piece in Reuters today, titled ‘The problem with Marc Andreessen’ – this is an attempt to spot some flaws in his argument.

1. “But Andreessen has never really been a public intellectual. His single greatest achievement — the creation of the world’s first web browser, Mosaic — took place under the auspices of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.”

- Simply put,that is not true. Marc and team wrote the code for Mosaic themselves – “David Thompson tested ViolaWWW and showed the application to Marc Andreessen.[10] Andreessen and Eric Bina originally designed and programmed NCSA Mosaic for Unix’s X Window System called xmosaic[4][6][10][11] “.
Source: Wikipedia.

What does Felix mean by “under the auspices of” anyway?

2. ““Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist,” I wrote in that piece, and Andreessen is Exhibit A if you want to look for such a person. “” –

Products evolve. Live evolves. Internet evolves faster. It is wrong to make an argument saying Netscape doesnt exist – we live in graphical browsers all day. As for Opsware, did Felix actually check what HP did with Opsware before penning this piece?

3. “For the first time, people in Silicon Valley understood that you could make enormous sums of money just by timing the markets — buying in at a low valuation and selling at a high valuation — even if the underlying company never made any money at all.

Andreessen’s current company, Andreessen Horowitz, is devoted to doing exactly that. ”

It has always been about timing. About the underlying company not making money – that is a scenario that did not play out (the company existing as a standalone entity) – it is difficult to make an argument based on that.

4. ” I’ve never met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL, or that HP gained much from buying Opsware beyond getting Andreessen to sit on its famously-dysfunctional board. ”

Felix, the fact that you have not met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL does not really mean much. One person’s contacts is too tiny a sample space for any meaningful analysis or drawing conclusions. Also, the second part that statement – is simple noise, IMHO.

5. “Andreessen’s also very shilly, when it comes to his own businesses: when Ning finally died, for instance, he put up a blog post all about how the team there had “brilliantly executed a dramatic transformation of the company”. The fact is, as a close reading of the Wired interview will attest, that while Andreessen does have a lot of good ideas, brilliant execution is not at the top of his list of abilities.”

I have used Ning, it is a solid product. A combination of things went wrong and hence the company failed. But that can be said for so many companies. Fact is, Ning did execute a dramatic transformation in the timeframe mentioned.

6. “While Andreessen is very good at making money, then, he’s much less good at creating lasting value for the long-term shareholders of his companies. In his world, buy-and-hold public shareholders are the patsies, the people left holding the bag when the fast money has long since departed.”

Andreessen has always made tonnes of money for the shareholders of his companies. What are we talking about here?

Summary: Surprised to see an article from Felix with a clear lack of research. Marc is not God (regardless of what Wired would make us believe), but he is not evil either.

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Relax: Instagram Was The World’s Largest Mobile Social Network, After All

For those of us still trying to digest the 1 billion price tag for Instagram – here is a simple way to look at the deal – The world’s second largest social network just bought the world’d largest mobile social network – we had spotted this some time back :

““Since Christmas the mobile photo network Instagram has gained over ten million users. This makes Instagram the largest mobile only social network with a global reach.”

Statistics Source: Socialnomics, Statspotting

If you noticed that we referred to Facebook as the World’s second largest social network – here is the largest social network in the world. We know, we know, that stat is outdated now. Facebook is closing in on a billion users – and remember, they are blocked in china.

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Google Drive Statistics: The Numbers You Need To Know

okay, Google Drive is out. What are the numbers you should know? We spotted something today thats basically a summary of all you need to know:

1. 5GB Free
2. 25GB for $2.49 a month
3. 100GB for $4.99 a month

“But Google outdoes Dropbox by giving you 5GB of capacity for free, 25GB for $2.49 a month, or 100GB for $4.99 a month — via Google Wallet, of course. (Or, if you’re feeling like pushing the envelope, there are other tiers including $50 a month for 1TB and $800 a month for 16TB.) Dropbox’s free tier ends at 2GB (unless you cajole your friends into joining with your referral code), then jumps to $9.99 monthly for 50GB or $19.99 monthly for 100GB.

That’s more expensive than the existing Google prices for overflow storage space at Picasa and Google Docs, which can be had for $50 a year for 200GB compared to $210 for Google Drive. That’s because Google expects much more active use, with data being sent to and from multiple devices frequently. “This is something we expect people to use with high utilization a lot,” Pichai said”

Statistics Source: CNet

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AWS Statistics: 1.5 Billion Dollar Business For Amazon Now

We had spotted multiple stats on Amazon Web services including, how many servers power AWS and the number of objects stored in S3 etc. However, we never clearly figured out the exact revenue numbers for Amazon Web Services (Amazon does not state that detail in its numbers) but today we spotted something that is close to accurate:

“Amazon’s revenue from the “other” category for the quarter ending March 31, 2012 was $500 million, up from $311 million for the year-ago period. If you assume “other” is AWS only, that’s a $2 billion-a-year run rate for 2012.

Now, before we go crazy, the “other” category includes, as an Amazon spokeswoman put it “non-retail activities, such as AWS, miscellaneous marketing and promotional activities, other seller sites, and our co-branded credit card agreements.” Still, even if AWS is 75 percent of that figure, that’s a $1.5 billion run rate for the year. ”

Statistics Source: GigaOm

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