2 million new books: “Annual Report,” International Publishers Association, Geneva, 2014, http://goo.gl/UNfZLP.
16,000 new films: “Most Popular TV Series/Feature Films Released in 2014 (Titles by Country),” IMDb, 2015, accessed August 5, 2015.
30 billion blog posts: Extrapolations based on the following: “About (Posts Today),” Tumblr, accessed August 5, 2015; and “A Live Look at Activity Across WordPress.com,” WordPress, accessed August 5, 2015.
182 billion tweets: “Company,” Twitter, accessed August 5, 2015.
400,000 new products: “Global New Products Database,” Mintel, accessed June 25, 2015.
total number of songs: “Introducing Gracenote Rhythm,” Gracenote, accessed May 1, 2015.
2,000 hours to completely read: Based on an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, average for U.S. eighth graders. Brett Nelson, “Do You Read Fast Enough to Be Successful?,” Forbes, June 4, 2012.
29 million words: “Great Books of the Western World,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Australia, 2015.
a third of Amazon sales: James Manyika, Michael Chui, Brad Brown, et al., “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, 2011. This is a conservative estimate. An outside analyst estimates it could be closer to two thirds.
about $30 billion in 2014: Extrapolated from 2014 sales/revenue of $88.9 billion. “Amazon.com Inc. (Financials),” Market Watch, accessed August 5, 2015.
300 people working: Janko Roettgers, “Netflix Spends $150 Million on Content Recommendations Every Year,” Gigaom, October 9, 2014.
automatically map one’s position: Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Mounia Lalmas, and Daniele Quercia, “Data Portraits: Connecting People of Opposing Views,” arXiv Preprint, November 19, 2013.
Studies show that going to the next circle: Eytan Bakshy, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, et al., “The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion,” arXiv, January 2012, 1201.4145 [physics].
200 average friends: Aaron Smith, “6 New Facts About Facebook,” Pew Research Center, February 3, 2014.
all the posts your friends make: Victor Luckerson, “Here’s How Your Facebook News Feed Actually Works,” Time, July 9, 2015.
35 billion emails a day: My calculation based on figures from the following: “Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018,” Radicati Group, April 2014; and “Email Client Market Share,” Litmus, April, 2015.
filters the content of 60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.
about 2 million times every minute: Danny Sullivan, “Google Still Doing at Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year,” Search Engine Land, January 16, 2015.
“3 billion questions a day”: Ibid.
“a poverty of attention”: Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
TV still captures most of our attention: Dounia Turrill and Glenn Enoch, “The Total Audience Report: Q1 2015,” Nielsen, June 23, 2015.
average CPM of various media platforms: “The Media Monthly,” Peter J. Solomon Company, 2014.
half a trillion hours: Calculation based on the following: “Census Bureau Projects U.S. and World Populations on New Year’s Day,” U.S. Census Bureau Newsroom, December 29, 2014; and Dounia Turrill and Glenn Enoch, “The Total Audience Report: Q1 2015,” Nielsen, June 23, 2015.
average $3.60 per hour of attention: Michael Johnston, “What Are Average CPM Rates in 2014?,” MonetizePros, July 21, 2014.
4.3 hours to read: Calculation based on Gabe Habash, “The Average Book Has 64,500 Words,” Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2012; and Brett Nelson, “Do You Read Fast Enough to Be Successful?” Forbes, June 4, 2012.
$23 to buy: Private communication with Kempton Mooney, Nielsen, April 16, 2015.
every one of the 60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.
guided by the context: “How Ads Are Targeted to Your Site,” AdSense Help, accessed August 6, 2015.
interest of the reader visiting: Jon Mitchell, “What Do Google Ads Know About You?,” ReadWrite, November 10, 2011.
21 percent of Google’s total revenue: “2014 Financial Tables,” Google Investor Relations, accessed August 7, 2015.
5,000 user-made submissions: Michael Castillo, “Doritos Reveals 10 ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ Ad Finalists,” Adweek, January 5, 2015.
awards $1 million to the winner: Gabe Rosenberg, “How Doritos Turned User-Generated Content into the Biggest Super Bowl Campaign of the Year,” Content Strategist, Contently, January 12, 2015.
4,000 were negative ads: Greg Sandoval, “GM Slow to React to Nasty Ads,” CNET, April 3, 2006.
asymmetry of attention in email: Esther Dyson, “Caveat Sender!,” Project Syndicate, February 20, 2013.
total lifetime spending of a customer: Brad Sugars, “How to Calculate the Lifetime Value of a Customer,” Entrepreneur, August 8, 2012.
$168,000 worth of merchandise: Morgan Quinn, “The 2015 Oscar Swag Bag Is Worth $168,000 but Comes with a Catch,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 22, 2015.
“downward trend in real commodity prices”: Paul Cashin and C. John McDermott, “The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices: Small Trends and Big Variability,” IMF Staff Papers 49, no. 2 (2002).
dropping cost of copper: Indur M. Goklany, “Have Increases in Population, Affluence and Technology Worsened Human and Environmental Well-Being?,” Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009).
Luxury entertainment is increasing 6.5 percent: Liyan Chen, “The Forbes 400 Shopping List: Living the 1% Life Is More Expensive Than Ever,” Forbes, September 30, 2014.
Spending at restaurants and bars: Hiroko Tabuchi, “Stores Suffer from a Shift of Behavior in Buyers,” New York Times, August 13, 2015.
price of the average concert ticket: Alan B. Krueger, “Land of Hope and Dreams: Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class,” remarks given at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, White House Council of Economic Advisers, June 12, 2013.