There Are Now More Mobiles Than People.

Mobile devices are expected to push internet use beyond 50% of the world’s population by mid to late 2016, and one third of those will be social media users – predominantly from developing nations; WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger now occupy the 3 out of 5 of the top social media sites; and the numbers from a recently released 2015 report by We Are Social show that the digital world passed some significant growth milestones in 2014, suggesting that we are well on the way to the ‘ubiquitous connectivity’ often cited. So, what are some of the staggering stats and important insights worth noting around this digital disruption?

• Worldwide social media users exceeded 2 billion back in August
• Worldwide penetration of mobile phones passed 50% in September
• The number of global internet users passed 3 billion in early November
• The number of active mobile connections surpassed the total world population just last month
• Almost 42% of the world’s population has access to the internet in January 2015, representing a significant jump in reported numbers since last year’s report, when the same figure was just 35%
• The average social media user spends 2 hours and 25 minutes per day using social networks and microblogs

“If people plus infrastructure equal disruption, then digital innovators plus digital infrastructure equals digital disruption. Massive digital disruption, at a scale and pace most are simply not prepared for.” —James McQuivey

And Shelly Palmer recently commented, “It took 30 years to connect the first two billion people to the internet. It will take less than seven to connect the next two billion,” he said. “Four billion people will live in a connected world in 2020. While no one can predict how disruptive this exponential increase in connectivity will be, we can expect to live in a profoundly different world.”

Image: Shelly Palmer, “Digital Wisdom For A Connected World”