Jan 1007
A Look Back at 2009: My Favorite Statistics and Trends Web Sites
It’s the new year and it’s customary to look at the previous year and make predictions about the upcoming year or decade. Every day in my e-mail inbox, I get a flood of Top Ten lists. So where do I go when I need statistics about which Web browser is winning the browser war, how many users Twitter really has, or the gadgets and technologies that will likely shine in 2010? Here are my favorite sites:
- The Pew Research Center has some of the best research about all kinds of trends shaping the US. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has great information about technology adoption, Web 2.0, social media and the technology divide.
- Ad Age is one of my favorite sites. The daily e-mail newsletter is one that I read nearly every day. This article on Where Digital Marketing is Heading in 2010 is a must read.
- When I’m looking for numbers and visitors demographics for a particular Web site, I go to Quantcast. For example, Quantcast estimates there are 23.3M Twitter users, of which 53% are female, 44% are between the ages of 18-34, and 75% are Caucasian. The data can be a stale by a few months, which is a problem for fast-growing sites, but the data is usually pretty solid.
- Although I live in the DC area, I’m a huge New York Times fan. Check out the 9th Annual Year in Ideas (the best!) and an awesome infographic that shows search terms related to cooking and Thanksgiving, by region of the country.
