Each quarter, our friend, Simon Kemp (if your not following him on Linkedin you should) creates this data report, here.  This gives an update as to what is going on in digital today.

I obviously need to point out that this is paid for by We are social and Hootsuite.

Let's dig in.

According to the United Nations the world's global population will hit 8 billion on 15th November 2022, but this figure is less than 1% lower than this time last year.  The United Nations states that the global population is growing at its slowest rate since the 1950s.

Of that global population, 59.3% are active on social media and the days of saying "my clients are not on social media" are well and truly over.

Also with the size of buying teams, even if one person in the buying team is not on social, the other 9 are.  There are, 10 stakeholders, according to Gartner make up the average buying team. 

This growth in people signing up for social media is a year-on-year growth of 190 million.  Let's not forget that social media empowerment of the world population is reaching saturation point as pretty much everybody apart from countries that block social media, such as North Korea etc have access to both the internet and social media.

The average person spend 2 hours and 28 minutes per day on social media.

Why do people use the internet?  To find information. Everything we do in our daily lives from looking for holidays to buying products and services requires us to go online.

We know the modern buyer is online and if you don't have a digitally enabled salesforce you are not at the party.

We all know that modern buyers are seeking out brands online, from people looking for holidays or the ESG impact of your washing power to buying ERP systems and new payroll systems.

The worldwide average is 49.2% of the worldwide population.

This breaks down as follows, 75.1% of this research is on social media, 15.6% on blogs, but you can see that areas known as "dark social" are also used, such as messaging, forums and question and answer sites such as Quora. 

As for using social media for work activities. the average of 22.1% say that their internet usage is for work related activities. 

21.3% of the world's internet population listen podcasts.

Podcasts are growing in popularity – Audiences listening to podcasts has grown by 6% of the last year and the time spent listening to those podcasts has grown by 7%. The average adult is now spending an hour a day listening to podcasts, which means that adults will listen to 23 million years’ worth of podcast content in 2023.

Cookies – Most people accept cookies – on average only 37% of people decline cookies.  It would seem that we just accept and move on to the content. Is there anything that the modern marketer who has annoying pop ups on their website, can learn from this?

There are 6.7 billion smartphones in the world and they use over 100 billion Gbytes every month.

The average cell phone user now uses 15.21 Gbytes of data per month, which is 30% more than they consumed last year.  Don't forget this is cellular traffic only and don't include data that we might use over WiFi.  Data usage growth is at 40% a year, which is actually the slowest growth ever reported.

The time spent online by the average person has declined, from 7 hours a day from this time last year to 6 hours and 37 minutes today. That means our daily internet activity has fallen by 5%. 

This means that the typical user now spend less time on the internet than they did before the outbreak of Covid-19. That said, reports do not show that the internet is losing relevance. 

In fact the data shows that people are coming more "purposeful" in the way they use the internet and the the time spent on the internet. The clear takeaway is ...