"We want to be connected, valued, and missed. We want people to know we exist and we don’t want to get bored." –Seth Godin describing why Facebook and Twitter are like crack cocaine.
On average, it takes visiting 3.32 friends of friends for Twitter users to find one of their followers. That means that with only a few re-tweets, messages can reach a Large audience.
The two things that people do most on Facebook are 1. put up and look at photos, and 2. play games.
The single most unifying cultural force is Wal-Mart. 138M Americans shop there each week.
Even people with bachelor’s or higher spend, on average, nearly 5x more time watching TV than reading books.
Horrifying book stats: There are about 550 books per day published in English. 10% make it to stores. 98% of books published are non-commercial, intentionally or not. The average book sells 500 copies, and the author gets 15% of the profits.
I think George Will was right when he called spectator sports "the great unobserved religious tradition." It speaks to the powerful human tendency to observe without participating.
In 2008, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon, and Dell made about $31,000 in profit per employee. Google, on the other hand, made $209,600.
Google made $18 of revenue per unique visitor per year. Facebook made $3.50, and Twitter $0.62.
20% of Google searches have never been done before.
Bankruptcy tourism
1 hour ago
