content and consumption

This page presents figures on film, book, newspaper and other content production, supplementing the Communications Revolution profile and the Metrics & Statistics guide.

It covers -

• base data
• internet content
• books
• newspapers and journals
• film
• recorded music
• images

     base data

Estimates of the amount of content produced and consumed, particularly prior to the 1960s, are contentious.

A useful overview of global estimates of non-internet content production and storage (eg of 22,643 newspaper titles, 40,000 scholarly journals, 80,000 mass-market periodicals and 40,000 newsletters in 1999) see the 2003 How Much Information report by Hal Varian & Peter Lyman and UNESCO studies discussed elsewhere on this site.

     internet content

The size & shape page of our metrics guide points to various internet statistics, from which we've extracted:

number of registered domains (June 00) - 17.75 million, 100% growth pa

number of pages (00) - between 880 million and 2.4 billion, depending on the statistical source

time to register first million domain names - four years. Time to move from 4 to 5 million names - three months

     books

Raj Reddy of CMU and the Million Books Project estimates that 100 million titles have been published globally since the birth of printing (OCLC's WorldCat covers around 48 million titles), with perhaps 80% dating from after 1900. Lyman & Varian suggest that the number of new titles published in US in 1996 was 68,000. In 2004 RR Bowker, responsible for the Books in Print database, reported that some 175,000 new titles were published in the US during 2003around 170,00. The overall number of titles in US tertiary education libraries in 1998 was estimated by the National Center for Education Statistics as 495.7 million.

     newspapers and journals

The reported number of journals published in the US in 1998 was 12,000. The global number of newspaper titles in 2000 was 8,391 dailies. In the US during 2002 there were some 6,700 weekly titles, 777 morning dailies and 692 evening dailies. The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) estimates daily global circulation of newspapers in 2001 at around 436.2 million copies, of which the EU accounted for some 78 million copies and Japan for 71 million.

Weekly and monthly magazine titles are reported to amount to 73,000.

The estimated volume of paper for books, magazines, newspapers in 2000 was estimated as 130 million tons pa.

Questioning the myth of the paperless office, Kurzweil comments that US business consumes 850 billion pages of paper in 1981, 2.5 trillion pages in 1986 and 4 trillion in 1990.

     film

Drawing on Alan Goble's International Film Index 1895-1990 (London: Bowker 1991) Lyman & Varian suggest that the global total of moving pictures made from 1890 to 2002 was approximately 368,530, of which 226,771 were features, 57,825 were shorts and 34,540 were made for television, 30,475 were documentaries, 113,992 were Black & White and 49,417 were Silents. An estimated 40,000 were no longer extant. The leading production countries in 2001 were the US (some 1,740 titles of a global total of 5,717) and India (1.013 titles).

     recorded music

[under development]

     still images

Around the world, more than 2,700 photographs are taken every second, with holiday snaps accounting for 80%.

Lyman & Varian (2003) suggest that worldwide around 75 billion film prints were made in 2002, with around 15% wastage of negatives. The total digital storage capacity of the film rolls produced in 2002 was about 440 petabytes (87.9 billion photos at 5 MB apiece), with 2.1 billion photographs being printed from digital cameras. The US market accounted for around a third of the three billion rolls of film pruduced in that year.

Lyman & Varian suggest that approximately 750 billion photographs existed worldwide in 1999, with addition 150 billion in the following two years. Assuming some 'attrition', the number of photos in existance at the end of 2003 might be around 900 billion. Most of those images are not seen by more than two people. Kodak has reportedly claimed that only some 2% of photographs are copied or modified in any way after they are originally developed. The largest image libraries - Getty Images (with 70 million images) and Corbis (with 65 million images) - appear to have digitised under 2% of their collections; most reproductions involve under 1% of those collections. The global market for stock photography as of 2000 was estimated as being upwards of US$2 billion pa, with around 40% of revenue going to the two major libraries.

Figures for the total number of cameras in existence and use are contentious. It is likely that digital cameras amounted for around half the cameras in early 2000 (55 million) and now represent over 50% of all photographic devices if mobile phones with a digital camera feature (over 25% of an estimated 150 mobiles sold in 2004) are included in the count.

 

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