Don't blink

I'm currently working on a sort of "thought piece" for clients on bandwidth, partially inspired by some of the statements and factoids contained in Level3's analyst day presentation from Tuesday. I'm writing about some of the stats I've come across recently regarding video IM, file sharing, user-generated content, etc. As part of this exercise I just had a look at Flickr! to see if I could ascertain how many images are stored there. I went to the most recent photos page and pointed my cursor at the most recent of the most recent, which is identified as 120744079, which is a pretty staggering number in itself. Out of curiosity I went to my own page, and noticed that the last photo I uploaded (17 days ago) was 112361150, which means that it looks like Flickr! adds something like 500k images a day currently. Staggering.

I've also taken the pain of collating all of P2Pnet's global Top Ten video download lists into tabular form and making a chart showing how this has trended (I may post this as an image later). My first data point is the week of 21 December 2004, during which the top ten were downloaded 3.9m times globally. My most recent datapoint is 23rd March 2006, when the total was 11.1m times. If you do a monthly run rate calculation based on average daily downloads using that figure, you get 49.2m downloads per month. That's an increase of 182% over the period, or a monthly compound growth rate of nearly 7%. AND THIS IS ONLY THE TOP TEN TITLES, PEOPLE. Oh, my pipes!