Think what you will about Facebook, but the main social network of choice today has become so big and so prevalent that there’s no escaping it. And we spend an almost ridiculous amount of time on Facebook. Another behemoth that is virtually everywhere and used by everyone is YouTube. You may have heard of it.

Let us walk you through some numbers for these two sites to give you an idea of how much they are being used worldwide and the massive amount of time we are spending on them.

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Text and numbers are all good and well, but sometimes it’s nice to just be presented with a nice visual.

This post is full of videos of just that, interesting visualizations of data. Being the geeks we are, they’re of course all related to the Web and the Internet.

Enjoy!

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User behavior differs greatly between websites. We wanted some hard data on what kind of websites get the most page views out of their visitors, and examined the top 1,000 websites on the Internet to find out.

What we specifically looked at was monthly page views per unique visitor. We calculated this number using traffic data from Google Ad Planner, then sorted the list by that number to create a “page views per visitor” top list.

The results, although not entirely unexpected, are interesting.

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Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.

Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.

And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?

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Everyone knows that the really big and popular websites have a ton of visitors. But how many? How much does it take to reach the top?

We were curious about this ourselves. We’ve all seen the almost absurd numbers involved with the very top sites (like Facebook), but what about website number 50, or 100, or 500? What does it take for a website, in terms of visitors, to reach such a ranking?

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That Twitter has been expanding well outside the borders of the United States is well known. It’s becoming a global social media phenomenon and much of its growth is currently coming from this international expansion. We thought it would be interesting to investigate where Twitter is growing the fastest right now.

By looking at traffic data to Twitter.com, we’ve identified several countries where Twitter is currently growing rapidly (this year). These are not necessarily countries that have a ton of Twitter users yet, but rather places where the traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards.

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Paypal has been around since 1998 (eBay bought it in 2002), which is a small eternity in internet time. By now it’s easily the most established online payment solution, so it should be in a great position to benefit from our general tendency to increasingly buy and pay for things online.

And something drastic happened about a year ago. Just look at how traffic to Paypal.com has been growing.

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There was a significant amount of media attention earlier this week around a report from traffic monitoring company Hitwise that claimed Facebook now has more traffic than Google in the US.

So let’s have a look at how it’s doing in the rest of the world.

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We stumbled upon this street sign on Flickr and just couldn’t resist putting this composite together.

No words necessary, really.

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Yesterday, a new anti-piracy law went live in Sweden. The result was an immediate 30% drop in Sweden’s Internet traffic.

The combined traffic passing through Sweden’s Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That’s a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place.

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