Back in the salad days of my youth, when German Shepherds and cocker spaniels outnumbered shih-tzus and chihuahuas, the magic of the day often arrived in an envelope, rescued from the mailbox and adorned with a hand-cancelled postage stamp.
Real letters, hand-scripted, occasionally by a fountain pen with cursive penmanship so perfect the envelope was carefully opened. The anticipation was great — what special, inscripted artwork would unfold from inside?
Times have changed. A magic letter is Sasquatch: rumored but never seen. My mail is bills and bulk junk. They do me no good but help the postman stay in shape. Straight to the trash, usually unopened, that stuff subsidizes a great but deeply troubled dependable service that 300 million Americans increasingly will not support.
Real mail was obsoleted by email. In its early days, email was exciting. But that has changed too, email having devolved into an electronic junk yard. Crawl through it long enough and perhaps you’ll stumble upon something salvagable. But fewer and fewer are caring to crawl.
Check out these stats from Pingdom, a data collection house that monitors digital trends. These numbers are relevant through 2010 and safely project forward.
Email by the numbers:
- 107 trillion. The number of emails sent in 2010 across the Internet.
- 294 billion. The average number of email messages per day. More than 2.8 million emails are sent every second of every hour of every day. No wonder their novelty is diluted!
- 25 billion Tweets. 25 billion tweets were sent out in 2010, with 100 million new accounts added. When Lady Gaga tweets, the world pays attention. Gaga is number one. When she sends out a message, 22.8 million followers receive it. Justin Bieber is second, with just over 20 million. And for those who simply must know … yes, Kim Kardashian does have more followers than the president of the United States: 14.4 million to 14.2).
Email users and their accounts, also by the numbers:
- 1.88 billion. The number of email users worldwide.
- 2.9 billion. The number of email accounts worldwide.
- 25%. Share of email accounts that are corporate.
- 480 million. New email users from 2009 to 2010. That’s right: nearly a half-billion more users — more than one million and every each day — hitchhike onto the system.
With the good follows the bad. Here’s the spam data:
- 89.1%. The share of emails that were spam. Nine of ten! “Holy cluttered mailbox, Batman!”
- 262 billion. The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
To frame the growth of email, compare recent email traffic to levels recorded from 2008-09: by the end of 2010 email usage had grown by 30 trillion messages. Spam, however, grew by 42 trillion. The trend is obvious: spam frequency is dramatically outstripping real email usage.
Also mushrooming are digital portals. The web is now home to more than 255 million websites. Roughly 21.4 million more are added each year. These sites cover the needs of 202 million domain names, a category which increases by seven percent annually.
The web is a global connector, with more than two billion people regularly accessing the internet. Asian users outnumber those in North America and Europe combined, 825.1 million to 741.3 million.
Because of global acceptance social media, such as Facebook, has exploded from its infancy and secondary purpose (and Internet novelty) to an Internet transforming powerhouse. Thirty billion pieces of user data are added to Facebook each month by more than 600 million users, most of whom reside outside the United States.
It is also worth pointing out that the old adage of “One picture is worth a thousand words” seems to be reaffirming that validity on the web too. Video content uploaded to and watched on the web is growing by exponential metrics. Quite often images minimize the need for words.
Two billion videos are watched each day on YouTube. The average Internet user watches 186 per month — 30 every day. Facebook is a video destination too. Twenty million video clips are uploaded to Facebook each month, resulting in over 2 billion monthly user watches.
It is not just videos that are transforming how content is changing on the web. Digital photography has enabled 5 billion still photos to be archived on Flickr. Five billion seems like a lot but is chump change compared to Facebook. Facebook hosts more than 3 billion photo uploads — more than 36 billion per year — seven times what Flickr houses.
Maintaining email effectiveness
For those of us who must use email in the course of business, here are three things to remember when trying to stand out in a crowded arena soiled by increasing abuse.
- Plug a great bumper sticker into your Subject line. Grab the reader’s attention. Do that and he or she will read it. Don’t do that and he or she will trash it.
- Keep the Body message short and to the point. Write it for the receiver and maximizes its relevance. Trends in digital communication are racing away from florid prose toward terse sound bites — no more Faulkner, much more Hemingway. Write tight.
- Close with a specific call to action. Do not perfume the pig. Get to the point.
We cannot change the world nor slow down the relentless technology march that reshapes life as we know and live it. But we can take twenty minutes to hand-write a letter to someone we care about.
If it’s been too long since you’ve sent one, change that. A stamp these days costs forty-five cents, up from a nickel when I was a kid. Four handwritten pages for forty-five cents? A handwritten letter is still the biggest bargain in show business.
Write and send one and you will brighten three people’s day: yours, theirs, and the postman.
He’s got to be sick of junk mail, too.