I just finished reading Click, by Bill Tancer. In a completely unsurprising turn of events, I really enjoyed his use of data to infer all sorts of things about our online behavior and preferences. I included some interesting statistics from the book below.

Hitwise, Tancer’s employer and data source, counts more than twice as many adult themed websites as retail sites in their database. The 40,000 adult websites they track accounted for 10% of Internet visits in August 2007. (Page 19)

While I was aware the YouTube had grown into a large site very quickly, I was shocked at how little time it took to dominate two of its biggest competitors. There is a chart on page 174 of the book that illustrates YouTube’s market share of visits versus Yahoo’s and Google’s video sites. In December of 2005, YouTube was the smallest of the three. Four months later in April of 2006, YouTube was five times larger than either competitor. Three months after that in July of 2006, YouTube was ten times larger, and the gap only grew wider thereafter.

Click is fast, interesting read. I recommend it.