Why social media is important to marketers

I don’t know how old this info is (or how accurate) because I can’t find the original post, which is somewhere on the Church of the Customer Blog. Bart Cleveland includes these factoids in a recent post at Small Agency Diary (AdAge.com) to underscore why social media is important to marketers:

  • By March 2006, 84 million Americans had broadband at home, a 40% jump from 2005 figures
  • By March 2006, Pew estimated 48 million Americans were regular online content creators
  • By the end of 2005, 139 million people in the world had a DSL (broadband) connection
  • In 2005, $6.7 billion worth of digital cameras were sold in the U.S.
  • About 41% of all cell phone owners use them as content tools
  • By the end of 2005, just over 1 billion people were online — that’s 1/6th of the world
  • Asia represents the world’s most populous online segment
  • By July 2006, 50 million blogs had been created and their number was doubling every 6 months
  • About 7,200 new blogs are created every hour
  • By 2006, 10 million people were listening to podcasts in 2006; by 2010, it’s expected to be 50 million people
  • About 100 million videos are viewed every day on YouTube; about 65,000 videos uploaded every day
  • In 2006, MySpace had over 100 million registered members, most of them from the U.S.