Chapter 1: Digital Users

Technology has enabled people to be more connected than ever before at an ever-increasing rate. One metric that can be explored is the time for a service to be released and until it has reached 50 million users. For example, according to “Essentials of Social Media Marketing”, the telephone took around 75 years to reach 50 million users. That is nearly an entire generation of people! Radio took 38 years and TV took only 13 years. The internet took just four years while AOL took only two and a half. Considering AOL is over the internet, it is incredible how quickly it spread through a more limited group of people. In terms of more modern services, Draw Something took just 50 days to reach 50 million users. This is an average of a million users per day! Angry Birds took just 35 days to reach 50 million users – more than 1.4 million users per day. Back when the telephone was invented there is no way that anyone could have predicted that services would be created that would enable millions of people to partake in the same service simultaneously, let alone a brand-new service.

As of January 2021, there are 4.66 billion internet users which is around 59.5% of the global population. This is a hallmark of great international cooperation and increased free time among people. This increased free time has created new markets for users to spend their time – social media and video streaming. The average user will spend nearly seven hours of his or her day on the internet of which three and a half hours are spent on video and two and a half on social media. These markets are very new and quickly expanding, though. In January 2016 there were 2.3 billion social media users but in January 2021 there were 4.2 billion. This is an increase of 82% in just five years. Year over year the user count increased by an average of nearly 13%. Social media is clearly an expanding market and a great business opportunity. The current social media user values may be inflated by users having multiple accounts, but the trend is still apparent.

The business opportunities are certainly important when looking forward but looking back is also interesting. As a computer science student most of my software is used by less people than I have fingers. At one of my internships, I worked on software used by more users, but still counted in just thousands. However, thousands of users are in no way comparable to 50 million users in terms of required infrastructure. The infrastructure for anywhere between one and a couple thousand users is very similar, it just costs a bit more for more users. When a system has millions of users, though, is when the infrastructure gets significantly more complex. There can be entire teams dedicated to individual pieces of required infrastructure. In fact, that team may not interact with the product itself at all. Even thinking about creating a service with billions of users, like Facebook, is both terrifying and fascinating. I would love to interact with the technical side as an observer, but I would hate to interact with the technical side as part of a support team.

Social media may seem like a very vague concept, but there are just a couple concrete areas. The first is the user facing side, the one most folks are accustomed to. The next is the business facing side, which we will be learning more about in this class. The last area is the backend, which is not very relevant to this class. Based on the previously provided statistics, the user facing side will only be expanding. The business facing side and backend will need to expand to support the user facing side. This class should enable us to support the user facing side from the business facing perspective.