Jaw-dropping digital marketing statistics for 2022
Sometimes it is difficult to understand the size of the digital marketing landscape, the scope of e-commerce around the world, and to fully grasp the opportunities it presents for creative entrepreneurs and their businesses.
Here are some numbers to put things into perspective.
The digital marketing opportunity
There are 5 billion people who use the Internet around the world. That’s 63.5% of the almost 8 billion people in the world today. This has grown from just 16% of the population that used the Internet in 2005, the year that the 1 billion mark was crossed.
If you think that as recently as 2000, just 22 years ago, only 413 million people around the world used the Internet, you get a clear picture of how quickly this monster-of-a-medium has grown.
The big players
There are a few giant corporations that drive the most traffic and the most revenue online. Here are a few key players.
Amazon
Amazon made US$469.8 billion in 2021. Of this, $33.4 billion was profit. Think about it. This translates to about $1.3 billion a day in revenue.
Amazon employs 1.3 million people directly and has over 300 million active customer accounts. Of these, over 200 million are Prime accounts.
Amazon is loathed as a high street killer, but it’s worth noting that about 2 million small and medium-sized businesses sell products through their website.
Meta / Facebook
Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, recorded revenues of $120.18 billion in 2022.
Meta also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, among other ventures.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had revenues of $282.113 billion for the twelve months ending September 30, 2022.
This represented a 17.94% increase from its 2021 revenues of $257.637 billion.
In the 2022 fiscal year, the Microsoft-owned social network for business brought in more than $13.8 billion.
TikTok
This new kid on the block is punching above its weight on many fronts. It brought in over $4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021 and is expected to triple that to $12 billion this year.
Pinterest’s annual revenue for 2021 was $2.578 billion.
Mobile use & digital marketing
91% of all people in the world have a mobile phone. That’s 7.26 billion people. 6.64 billion of these are smartphones.
62.06% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Make sure you’re optimizing your website for mobile.
Retail sales from mobile devices are expected to be worth 431.4 billion dollars in 2022. That’s about half of the projected total online retail sales of $1.07 trillion for the year.
Social Media
Facebook has about 3 billion active monthly users (If you want to geek out, that’s about 40% of all the people on earth). During the third quarter of 2022, about 2 billion of these users came onto the platform every day.
The country with the most Facebook users is India, with 349.7 million active users. The United States comes in second with 182.3 million.
There are over 1.44 billion active monthly users on Instagram every month (August 2022). 88% of them are outside the United States. The average Instagram business account posts once a day and has an engagement rate of 0.96%.
TikTok
TikTok is notable because of the speed at which it is growing. While all the other businesses on this list were founded in the United States, TikTok started in China. It hit the 1 billion user mark in 2021 and is expected to have hit 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022.
Search
It will come as no surprise that Google is the biggest search engine. 94% of all searches take place on Google platforms. This includes searches on Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Images.
Yahoo and Bing have 1.41% and 1.18% market share respectively.
45.25% of Google searches result in Organic clicks. Only 4.42% of clicks come from ads.
Here’s a big one. According to Ahrefs, 90.63% of all content on the Internet gets no traffic from Google Search. This digital marketing statistic alone should send you on a search engine optimization spree for your website. Don’t be one of the pages Google ignores.
Online Video
Online videos have a reach of over 91.4% of all people online with the most popular type of videos being music videos (51%). Funny videos, memes, and viral videos come in second with 36.7%. In third place, are tutorials and how-to videos (30.6%).
YouTube, the largest video-sharing platform, has 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors. It receives over 14 billion visits per month, making it the world’s second most visited website, second only to Google.com (45.41 billion visits). Facebook comes in third with 11.74 billion visits per month.
YouTube users stream 694,000 hours of video every minute. 22% of these users access the site via mobile.
Across social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook video continues to grow as the most popular medium. This has seen more digital marketing teams and content creators turn to video as their primary content form.
Blogs & Websites
There are about 2 billion websites on the world wide web, but it is estimated that less than 400 million of these are active.
600 million of these websites are blogs.
There are 4.4 million blog posts published every day.
There are 2 million bloggers in the United States.
Global Sales
We mentioned above that online retail sales are expected to hit $1.07 trillion in the US this year. That’s about one-fifth of the total expected $5.55 trillion global eCommerce sales expected in 2022.
This will represent 21% of all sales.
eMarketer predicts that the total value of eCommerce sales will reach $6.17 trillion in 2023.
Digital marketing as an industry
The US digital advertising and marketing market is estimated at $460 billion.
Businesses continue to increase the amount they spend on digital marketing. Between 2020 and 2021 the growth rate in this sector was 14% with 63% of businesses increasing their digital marketing budgets.