Jun 262008
- Number of users in Habbo Hotel worldwide: 20,000,000
- “Hottest” book in the US last year according to Time Magazine: 1,500,000+. (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
- Best-selling graphic novel in the US last year: 80,000. (Naruto)
- Digital sales of a hit song: 2,100,000 (Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love”)
- Average downloads of a downloadable Rock Band track: 100,000
- Viewers of the #1 show on US TV (including DVR): 28,800,000 (American Idol)
- Viewers of the #150 show on US TV: 2,400,000 (Gossip Girl)
- Users of World of Warcraft in North America: 2,500,000
- Monthly uniques for Gaia Online: 2,000,000+
- Total number of movie tickets sold in the US in one year: 1,400,000,000
- Estimated tickets sold to the new Indiana Jones movie in five weeks: 42,290,849 (using 2007 average US ticket price and grosses to date).
Just some figures that caught my eye while browsing a few different publications…
18 Responses to “Numbers”
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Average downloads of a downloadable Rock Band track: 100,000 Viewers of the #1 show on US TV (including DVR): 28,800,000 (American Idol) Viewers of the #150 show on US TV: 2,400,000 (Gossip Girl) Users of World of Warcraft in North Original post byTechnorati Search for: naruto
Average downloads of a downloadable Rock Band track: 100,000 Viewers of the #1 show on US TV (including DVR): 28,800,000 (American Idol) Viewers of the #150 show on US TV: 2,400,000 (Gossip Girl) Users of World of Warcraft in North Original post byTechnorati Search for: world of warcraft
Raph Koster’s latest post
I’ve never seen a breakout of World of Warcraft subscriber numbers by region, and I’ve always been curious. Where did you get the 2.5 million figure? Is it a guesstimate or a solid number?
These are REALLY interesting, by the way.
-Fargo
I’m curious about the source of the Rock Band figures. I know of one site that tracks unofficial sales of downloadable content for the game, and it simply counts the number of entries on the leaderboards for each track — which tops out at 100,000 (not sure how they differentiate between the figures for the PS3 and XBox versions of the game). These figures are useful for seeing the rate at which different tracks are downloaded (is Jimmy Buffet more popular than Disturbed?), but not as much for an accurate picture of total DLs, since most tracks will hit 100,000 sooner or later. It seems like Harmonix and Activision (makers of the Guitar Hero series) play the official figures close to the vest as they scramble to sign more acts for each platform.
But if there’s a more reliable source for that 100,000 figure, I’d like to see it. Rock Band has me buying and listening to music I otherwise would pass by, and has even inspired me to blow the dust off my MIDI keyboard and composing software. I take an active interest in its success.
Hey Fargo, check out http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/
You can find the WoW numbers in a Blizzard press release. (Oh, and thanks for the tipoff about this piece in your column, Fargo!)
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/080122.html
Interesting numbers, but they don’t tell me as much as I hoped to know.
I’d like to know what the veiwership numbers for the #1 adn #150 TV shows were 10, 20, 40 years ago, to see whether TV watching is changing.
I’d like to see numbers of top music album or single bought in the store today, 10, 20, and 40 years ago, to see whether online purchases are really affecting store purchases and to what extent.
I’d like to see total number of people who have a subscription/membership to any major online game, not just WOW.
I’d like a lot of other things too, so I don’t mean to complain or anything. The blog post is still interesting to see a current comparison picture 🙂
Raph.
RAPH.
Harry Potter 7 came out last year. With an initial US print run of twelve million copies.
I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that at least 15% of those copies actually sold, meaning that your figure for best selling book in the US last year is probably a touch off. Heh.
Without the accompanying methodology for calculating these figures, the sales figures alone mean little. What about ancillary sources of revenue? These sources can be derived, for example, from World of Warcraft emulators.
A particular network of such emulated servers has over 20,000 users. There’s no telling what effect these users have on subscriptions, purchases of related World of Warcraft merchandise, purchases of related Blizzard merchandise, and the diffusion of word of mouth about Blizzard and related products throughout the marketplace.
Sales figures help companies track their direct income, but for the rest of us not affiliated with those companies, they aren’t necessarily strong indicators of success. Whatever “formula” the number crunchers hope to create from sales figures will always be incomplete and impractical.
Wikipedia:
Just to put things in perspective…
The WoW numbers are always for accounts, not people; many people have multiple accounts. Still, as long as they’re not counting trial accounts, each of those is associated with a credit card, and therefore pretty close to a person.
The Habbo numbers are also for accounts, but are far less unique per person. Each avatar you make is a different account. Making free accounts is trivial, and kids have little attachment to each avatar. They’ll often make a new avatar rather than try to recover a lost password. Payment methods like paypal and cell phone often have multiple accounts per real user.
There might well be millions of active Habbo users, but it’s impossible to get anything reliable from their stats.
The only meaningful measure of VWs is monthly online hours. If you want to estimate users, you can divide by average session time. Sadly, most games won’t report these numbers, because they think that by using a more inflated number, they can sound more impressive.
I knew I should have listed more sources!
The number came from the press release that Doggabone cited.
http://ca.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idCAN2329170920080523?sp=true says:
Try THE LONG TAIL, there’s some stats there.
Yah, wouldn’t we all. 🙂
That figure came from TIME Magazine, the latest issue, the article on comics and movies.
As I said, it was a collection of figures that caught my eye. I don’t have revenue figures for most of it (it’s quite transparent for movies, but completely invisible for many other media, for example).
Heh, yah. There are always more numbers.
Unique sites visiting this blog in May: 44,700.
Different services have different typical session lengths, so I don’t think hours are a great comparison either.
[sarcasm]Number of movies downloaded from “torrent” sites last month – 40,000,000.
Number of torrents deleted after 10 minutes of playtime because they suck – 39,500,000[sarcasm]
Another interesting set of numbers from a few days ago:
– There are 1 billion PCs in use.
– PC growth is now at a rate of 12% per year, most of it from emerging markets.
– 16% of PCs are being replaced a year => A 6.25 year lifespan for the typical PC.
These numbers are interesting because they ultimately affect where many of Raph’s numbers are going.
Let’s try again. From Time Magazine…
Emphasis mine. Now, pulling a random site off of a ‘Harry Potter 7 sales’ Google search, Publisher’s Weekly…
So, yeah. I’m guessing the author of that Time article was dubbing A Thousand Splendid Suns as the ‘hottest novel of last year’ using a set of criteria that are known to no one but herself.
On a related note, the Naruto figure in the same article, while technically correct (Bookscan has Volume 13 at 80,423 copies), is a bit misleading. Volumes of the Naruto series as a whole made up 16 of the top 30 graphic novels sold last year, and no individual volume sold fewer than 27,000 copies. That’s certainly not Harry Potter numbers, but it’s definitely a hot property and likely possessing something more than merely ‘cult appeal’.
Good catch, Hermes. I edited the post to reflect Time’s bias. 😉
Found the actual top selling books of 2007, with Potter, as you suspected, at the top.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-01-16-top-100-books_N.htm
No figures, though. 🙁
Ah, that’s a way better link, if only because we now have concrete evidence as to why our children are doing progressively worse in school. 🙂
Now, if we were to combine those two into Harry Potter and the Last Minute Cram Session, we just might have something…
I PK UR NUMBERS…
Raph Koster had an interesting post up today with a few random statistics and numbers he’s found browsing things over the last while. After taking issue with one of the numbers he posted from Time Magazine (damn you, Time), I decided that it migh…
Mike Rozak:
Consider this: India has 350 million kids. (under 15 years)
In January 2008, for 6.6 billion people in the world there were (at least):
– 850 million automobiles (not sure what that contains)
– 900 million PCs in use
– 1.3 billion fixed landline phones
– 1.4 billion credit card owners
– 1.5 billion TV sets in use
– 3.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions (about 2.6 billion users)
1.3 billion Internet users:
– 37% only via computer
– 30% only via mobile phone
– 25% of all mobile phone users access Internet with their devices
Soo… How are the mobile clients for Metaplace coming along? :p
All numbers from TomiAhonen Consulting.