Statistics about volunteering, spare time, and crowdsourcing are always useful to have around. We’ll try to keep as many as we can compiled and referenced here. This is always a work in progress…
Volunteering
Most volunteers do not perform service activities that relate to their professional or occupational skills. Volunteers who use their
skills when they serve appear to be more likely to continue serving
from year to year.
Source: Capitalizing on Volunteers’ Skills: Volunteering by Occupation in America
US, 2007-2008, 26.4% volunteered at least once, or 61.8m
Persons aged 35-44 are most likely to volunteer
Median of 52 hours spent volunteering annually
Most are involved with either 1 or 2 organizations
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics: Volunteering in the United States, 2008
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45.6% of all people and 60.7% of employed people cite
lack of time as the primary reason for not volunteering. All kinds of other reasons listed in this report.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics: Economic News Release, 2005
Volunteers (US only) age 15 and over spent an average of 2.2 hours volunteering.
Source: B of LS
iPhone
Jan 2009, iPhone app downloads reach 500 million
15,000 apps in the App Store
Source: CNET
iPhone App sales: $510m by Jan 2009 (using the math at source below)
Developer gets 70% and Apple gets 30%
Avg. price of top 10 apps: $2.80 (on Dec 5, 2008)
Source: Silicon Alley Insider
Top Paid Apps
Top 10 Free Apps
Top Paid Games
Top Free Games
All of the top apps are games.
…and more, see:
Source: Mobile Crunch
IPhone Dominates Web Traffic
http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/iPhone+news/news.asp?c=11906
Mobile Phones
Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users surpassed 1.15 billion units in 2007, a 16 per cent increase from 2006 sales of 990.9 million.
Source: Gartner, Inc
Smartphone Sales To Hit $200 Billion In 2012 @ 700 million total units
Source: Info Week
80-95% of American households have a mobile phone (depending on household type)
47% have three or more mobile devices
Source: Pew Networked Families
Mobile Gaming
31 million mobile gamers in the US (determined by having downloaded and paid for a mobile game)
Source: Mobile Gamers in the US
Research shows that gamers spend several minutes a session with a mobile game.
Source: Mobile Gamers: Consumers Don’t Pay to Play
Mobile gamers spend about 4.6 hours per week mobile gaming
Source: ClickZ
Spare Time / Human Computation / Cognitive Surplus
People type 200 million Captchas every day around the world, or a collective estimate of 500,000 man hours (at 10 seconds per puzzle). By the time the average American has turned 21, researchers estimate that he or she has spent about 10,000 hours playing video games–that’s the equivalent of holding down a full-time job for five years. In 2003, players collectively spent 9 billion human hours on the game Solitaire. In contrast, building the Empire State Building took only 7 million human hours, or the equivalent of a collective 6.8 Solitaire hours.
Average Time spent on various activities by an average person:
1.9s Captchas
7.6h Sleeping
17m Bathroom
1.1h Electronic games
1.1h Eating & Drinking
1h Household chores
1.1h Caring for others
1.7h Email and IM
2.4h TV
7.6h other
Source: Luis von Ahn cited by CNET. No other source given. Have contacted von Ahn asking for how he calculated these figures. His research page is here. Video of von Ahn talking is here.
Clay Shirky has a great speech about cognitive surplus. He quotes these stats:
200 billion hours are spent watching TV in the US alone every year
100 million hours a weekend are spent watching TV ads alone.
1 trillian hours of TV watched by the Internet population.
Source: Blip.Tv Video
Pithy Quotes
“There’s almost as many people buying smartphones as there are people buying laptops, and that trend is about to turn the computing industry on its head.”
Source: CNET
“A traditional volunteer activity such as stuffing
envelopes for a mail campaign might be worth about minimum wage
(the federal minimum wage is currently set at $6.55 per hour). If that
volunteer serves 50 hours in a year, that amounts to a little less than
$330 of volunteer value gained by the nonprofit. However, if that
volunteer is a management professional who uses their skills to
manage the same mail campaign, each hour is worth an average of
$46.22. Multiplied by the same 50 hours, that is a total of over $2300 of
volunteer value for the nonprofit. “
Lots of great stats here about value per volunteer hours, skills based volunteering and rates of volunteerism among professions.
Source: Capitalizing on Volunteers’ Skills: Volunteering by Occupation in America
Translation Industry
Fees: http://www.lengua.com/fees.shtml
Nonprofits
1.4million in the US. (need reference) Got this from an NTEN promo newsletter
