Raph's Website » Numbers

Numbers

June 26th, 2008 (Visited 1454 times) Tags: console games, gaia, habbo, rock band, WoW

Number of users in Habbo Hotel worldwide: 20,000,000
“Hottest” book in the US last year according to Time Magazine: 1,500,000+. (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
Best-selling graphic novel in the US last year: 80,000. (Naruto)
Digital sales of a hit song: 2,100,000 (Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love”)
Average downloads of a downloadable Rock Band track: 100,000
Viewers of the #1 show on US TV (including DVR): 28,800,000 (American Idol)
Viewers of the #150 show on US TV: 2,400,000 (Gossip Girl)
Users of World of Warcraft in North America: 2,500,000
Monthly uniques for Gaia Online: 2,000,000+
Total number of movie tickets sold in the US in one year: 1,400,000,000
Estimated tickets sold to the new Indiana Jones movie in five weeks: 42,290,849 (using 2007 average US ticket price and grosses to date).

Just some figures that caught my eye while browsing a few different publications…

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pkurflax.org wrote on June 26th, 2008 at 9:22 pm:

I PK UR NUMBERS…

Raph Koster had an interesting post up today with a few random statistics and numbers he’s found browsing things over the last while. After taking issue with one of the numbers he posted from Time Magazine (damn you, Time), I decided that it migh…

much less than 00000011 wrote on June 26th, 2008 at 10:22 pm:

Raph Koster’s latest post

Anime News Updated wrote on June 27th, 2008 at 12:45 am:

Average downloads of a downloadable Rock Band track: 100,000 Viewers of the #1 show on US TV (including DVR): 28,800,000 (American Idol) Viewers of the #150 show on US TV: 2,400,000 (Gossip Girl) Users of World of Warcraft in North Original post byTechnorati Search for: naruto

World Of Warcraft News wrote on June 27th, 2008 at 12:45 am:

Fargo said on June 26th, 2008 at 9:59 am:

I’ve never seen a breakout of World of Warcraft subscriber numbers by region, and I’ve always been curious. Where did you get the 2.5 million figure? Is it a guesstimate or a solid number?

These are REALLY interesting, by the way.

-Fargo

Yukon Sam said on June 26th, 2008 at 10:40 am:

I’m curious about the source of the Rock Band figures. I know of one site that tracks unofficial sales of downloadable content for the game, and it simply counts the number of entries on the leaderboards for each track — which tops out at 100,000 (not sure how they differentiate between the figures for the PS3 and XBox versions of the game). These figures are useful for seeing the rate at which different tracks are downloaded (is Jimmy Buffet more popular than Disturbed?), but not as much for an accurate picture of total DLs, since most tracks will hit 100,000 sooner or later. It seems like Harmonix and Activision (makers of the Guitar Hero series) play the official figures close to the vest as they scramble to sign more acts for each platform.

But if there’s a more reliable source for that 100,000 figure, I’d like to see it. Rock Band has me buying and listening to music I otherwise would pass by, and has even inspired me to blow the dust off my MIDI keyboard and composing software. I take an active interest in its success.

David McGraw said on June 26th, 2008 at 11:46 am:

Hey Fargo, check out http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/

Doggabone said on June 26th, 2008 at 12:05 pm:

You can find the WoW numbers in a Blizzard press release. (Oh, and thanks for the tipoff about this piece in your column, Fargo!)

IRVINE, Calif. — January 22, 2008 — Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. … World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.

http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/080122.html

Komag said on June 26th, 2008 at 1:20 pm:

Interesting numbers, but they don’t tell me as much as I hoped to know.

I’d like to know what the veiwership numbers for the #1 adn #150 TV shows were 10, 20, 40 years ago, to see whether TV watching is changing.

I’d like to see numbers of top music album or single bought in the store today, 10, 20, and 40 years ago, to see whether online purchases are really affecting store purchases and to what extent.

I’d like to see total number of people who have a subscription/membership to any major online game, not just WOW.

I’d like a lot of other things too, so I don’t mean to complain or anything. The blog post is still interesting to see a current comparison picture

Hermes said on June 26th, 2008 at 1:34 pm:

Raph.

RAPH.

Harry Potter 7 came out last year. With an initial US print run of twelve million copies.

I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that at least 15% of those copies actually sold, meaning that your figure for best selling book in the US last year is probably a touch off. Heh.

Morgan Ramsay said on June 26th, 2008 at 2:28 pm:

Without the accompanying methodology for calculating these figures, the sales figures alone mean little. What about ancillary sources of revenue? These sources can be derived, for example, from World of Warcraft emulators.

A particular network of such emulated servers has over 20,000 users. There’s no telling what effect these users have on subscriptions, purchases of related World of Warcraft merchandise, purchases of related Blizzard merchandise, and the diffusion of word of mouth about Blizzard and related products throughout the marketplace.

Sales figures help companies track their direct income, but for the rest of us not affiliated with those companies, they aren’t necessarily strong indicators of success. Whatever “formula” the number crunchers hope to create from sales figures will always be incomplete and impractical.

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on June 26th, 2008 at 3:03 pm:

Wikipedia:

By October 1972, the Beatles’ worldwide sales total stood at 545 million units.

Just to put things in perspective…

Kami Harbinger said on June 26th, 2008 at 3:19 pm:

The WoW numbers are always for accounts, not people; many people have multiple accounts. Still, as long as they’re not counting trial accounts, each of those is associated with a credit card, and therefore pretty close to a person.

The Habbo numbers are also for accounts, but are far less unique per person. Each avatar you make is a different account. Making free accounts is trivial, and kids have little attachment to each avatar. They’ll often make a new avatar rather than try to recover a lost password. Payment methods like paypal and cell phone often have multiple accounts per real user.

There might well be millions of active Habbo users, but it’s impossible to get anything reliable from their stats.

The only meaningful measure of VWs is monthly online hours. If you want to estimate users, you can divide by average session time. Sadly, most games won’t report these numbers, because they think that by using a more inflated number, they can sound more impressive.

Raph said on June 26th, 2008 at 3:45 pm:

I knew I should have listed more sources!

The number came from the press release that Doggabone cited.

I’m curious about the source of the Rock Band figures.

http://ca.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idCAN2329170920080523?sp=true says:

In slightly more than six months, the number of songs downloaded to the “Rock Band” game has surpassed 10 million tracks, according to MTV Networks, while song downloads from “Guitar Hero” passed 15 million, according to Activision. With more than 100 songs available for download via the “Rock Band” platform, that’s an average of 100,000 downloads per song sold through the game.

I’d like to know what the veiwership numbers for the #1 adn #150 TV shows were 10, 20, 40 years ago, to see whether TV watching is changing.

I’d like to see numbers of top music album or single bought in the store today, 10, 20, and 40 years ago, to see whether online purchases are really affecting store purchases and to what extent.

Try THE LONG TAIL, there’s some stats there.

Yah, wouldn’t we all.

Harry Potter 7 came out last year. With an initial US print run of twelve million copies.

I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that at least 15% of those copies actually sold

That figure came from TIME Magazine, the latest issue, the article on comics and movies.

Without the accompanying methodology for calculating these figures, the sales figures alone mean little. What about ancillary sources of revenue?

As I said, it was a collection of figures that caught my eye. I don’t have revenue figures for most of it (it’s quite transparent for movies, but completely invisible for many other media, for example).

By October 1972, the Beatles’ worldwide sales total stood at 545 million units.

Just to put things in perspective…

Heh, yah. There are always more numbers.

Unique sites visiting this blog in May: 44,700.

Different services have different typical session lengths, so I don’t think hours are a great comparison either.

The Pastor said on June 26th, 2008 at 4:44 pm:

[sarcasm]Number of movies downloaded from “torrent” sites last month - 40,000,000.
Number of torrents deleted after 10 minutes of playtime because they suck - 39,500,000[sarcasm]

Mike Rozak said on June 26th, 2008 at 4:58 pm:

Another interesting set of numbers from a few days ago:

- There are 1 billion PCs in use.

- PC growth is now at a rate of 12% per year, most of it from emerging markets.

- 16% of PCs are being replaced a year => A 6.25 year lifespan for the typical PC.

These numbers are interesting because they ultimately affect where many of Raph’s numbers are going.

Hermes said on June 26th, 2008 at 6:30 pm:

Let’s try again. From Time Magazine…

Graphic novels–long comic books for grownups–have always had mostly cult appeal. Last year’s most successful, the 13th volume in a Japanese manga adventure series–Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto–sold 80,000 copies, far short of 2007’s hottest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, which sold more than 1.5 million copies.

Emphasis mine. Now, pulling a random site off of a ‘Harry Potter 7 sales’ Google search, Publisher’s Weekly…

Scholastic said Sunday that HP 7, which had a first printing of 12 million copies, sold a record-breaking 8.3 million copies in the U.S. in its first 24 hours. At Borders the book broke a record for the chain, selling 1.2 million copies worldwide, “the highest single-day sales of any title ever in Borders history,” the retailer said. B&N had previously announced that preorders for the book had exceeded one million and Amazon presold 2.2 million copies; B&N and Bloomsbury, HP’s British publisher, will release their numbers on Monday.

So, yeah. I’m guessing the author of that Time article was dubbing A Thousand Splendid Suns as the ‘hottest novel of last year’ using a set of criteria that are known to no one but herself.

On a related note, the Naruto figure in the same article, while technically correct (Bookscan has Volume 13 at 80,423 copies), is a bit misleading. Volumes of the Naruto series as a whole made up 16 of the top 30 graphic novels sold last year, and no individual volume sold fewer than 27,000 copies. That’s certainly not Harry Potter numbers, but it’s definitely a hot property and likely possessing something more than merely ‘cult appeal’.

Raph said on June 26th, 2008 at 7:54 pm:

Good catch, Hermes. I edited the post to reflect Time’s bias.

Found the actual top selling books of 2007, with Potter, as you suspected, at the top.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-01-16-top-100-books_N.htm

No figures, though.

Hermes said on June 26th, 2008 at 8:26 pm:

Ah, that’s a way better link, if only because we now have concrete evidence as to why our children are doing progressively worse in school.

96. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

97. The Official SAT Study Guide

Now, if we were to combine those two into Harry Potter and the Last Minute Cram Session, we just might have something…

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on June 26th, 2008 at 11:27 pm:

Mike Rozak:

- There are 1 billion PCs in use.

- PC growth is now at a rate of 12% per year, most of it from emerging markets.

Consider this: India has 350 million kids. (under 15 years)

PekkaR said on July 1st, 2008 at 10:41 am:

In January 2008, for 6.6 billion people in the world there were (at least):
- 850 million automobiles (not sure what that contains)
- 900 million PCs in use
- 1.3 billion fixed landline phones
- 1.4 billion credit card owners
- 1.5 billion TV sets in use
- 3.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions (about 2.6 billion users)

1.3 billion Internet users:
- 37% only via computer
- 30% only via mobile phone
- 25% of all mobile phone users access Internet with their devices

Soo… How are the mobile clients for Metaplace coming along? :p

All numbers from TomiAhonen Consulting.