Statistics_Data_Facts

This week we take a look at the number of people who use social media. For this purpose I have created two graphs: One showing the number of people who use some of the most visited western social media over time; the other showing the user growth of these social media, taking as a zero point on the X-axis the day they launched.  In both cases, I've included monthly active users, i.e people that use each service at least once a month.  The number of Facebook's monthly active users is unfathomable. Facebook reported that over 2,91 billion people visited its platform during the third quarter of 2021. That means that 1 in 3 people on this planet connected one way or another to Facebook. If the growth is to continue, Facebook will announce that it has surpassed 3 billion monthly users during 2022, or 18 years after it first launched.  Facebook passed the 1 billion mark (pun intended) b...

What is ransomware? In case you haven't come across this term before, simply put, ransomware is a type of computer virus that blocks access to all your personal files, unless you pay the creator(s) of that virus a ransom.  According to this aptly titled article  « Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate ry This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate »  from KrebsOnSecurity "Virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian" This mainly happens because the perpetrators of these ransomware attacks usually come from those countries and the local authorities there, won't initiate an investigation unless someone within the country's borders files an official complaint .  So, when ransomware is about to get installed on your computer, it will che...

In the past we've looked at the impact smartphones had on the camera industry as well as the replacement of horses by the advent of cars .  This week we take a look at the impact the Internet had on the Newspaper industry.  The newspaper industry saw its hay day in the late 80s to early 90s with more than 120million newspapers sales each year with more than 60 million of those, being Sunday newspapers. It only went down from there, partly because of the rise of the internet. Now-days, just over 50m newspapers are estimated to be sold each year with the Sundays newspaper making half of those sales. The internet usage on the other hand has skyrocketed with more than 290m Americans using the internet in 2019.  The data on the newspapers sales are provided by the Pew Research Center  and the data on the internet users are provided by the WordBank . Since the WordBank only provided the percentage of population using the Internet I also use...