Digg snags 500,000+ members, Netscape 50,000, how does that compare to the internet population? |
Congratulations to Digg that has crossed the 500,000 member mark. An impressive amount of members for any site. I was curious this morning how that compared to the total internet population? I think it’s important to remember how many people there are in the world and how many are connected to the internet as to what really makes something a worldwide success.
I think most people in the tech community, myself included, would consider Digg a success, but what about the rest of the world?
According to Internet World Stats there are 1,043,104,886 connected to the internet. A little over a billion folks worldwide that could possibly be Digg members. Maybe a little more if you count people going to libraries to sign up for websites.
500,000 is a very small fractional percentage of the total internet connected population. If you take Netscape who just announced crossing the 50,000 member mark the numbers are that much smaller. It’s the kind of thing where you’d see several zeroes on the calculator.
Pretty insignificant in the big picture, isn’t it?
Important to get grounded once in awhile and remember these stats when talking about the success or failure of something. I can’t think of anybody, myself included, who wouldn’t think a half million or even 50,000 members for a site isn’t a good achievement. Heck, getting 5,000 members to join a site and a large percantage active isn’t easy. Of Digg’s 500,000 members they probably have less than 5,000 truly active members worldwide. The number of active to passive members, at least in my experience, is very low.
Somewhat unrelated, but check out the population in Asia compared to North America in that stats table.
North America population: 331,473,276
Asia: 3,667,774,066
Digg’s numbers when you compare to North America where most of their users come from (I believe) are more significant.
Anybody who doesn’t think the Asian market is a significant piece of the international puzzle had best study these stats.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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I wonder how many of the members stats include those with multiple accounts, or defunct accounts. You can track users by connections, but I seriously doubt Digg actually keeps a superbly accurate count just like AOL doesn’t. It’s in their best interest to inflate the numbers to advertisers. At least that’s the thought of it.
Comment by darkmoon — September 1, 2006 @ 9:52 am PST