Posts tagged Growth
Nginx Continues Growth, Adds Commercial Offerings
Feb 8th
According to the Netcraft Web Server Survey for February 2012, Nginx was “the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month” by picking up 0.27 percentage points. Good news for the upstart Web server, just as the brand-new company behind Nginx takes the wraps off its commercial packages.
Nginx has had quite the growth spurt over the past year. In February of last year Nginx had 7.57% of the market, or about 21 million domains hosted with Nginx. Microsoft had 20.04%, or about 57 million. Apache was at 60.10%, with more than 171 million domains.
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Fast-forward to this February, and Nginx has grown to 9.89% of the market surveyed by Netcraft. The overall market has grown considerably, as well – Nginx now has about 60 million domains. Microsoft has dropped to 14.38% of the overall market, with just over 88 million domains, and Apache has reclaimed some of the market and sits at 64.92% or more than 397 million domains. To put that another way, in the last year (according to Netcraft) Nginx has picked up nearly 40 million domains, while IIS has picked up about 31 million.
From the Netcraft February 2012 Web Server Survey
That’s not too shabby for a project that has a tiny developer team and a mere $3 million in funding so far
Commercial Offerings
The first set of commercial offerings from Nginx are three support tiers that range from $1,100 a month to more than $6,600 a month. The starter package, Essential, includes support for up to 10 servers and covers two incidents per month with a resolution time of 96 hours (or less). It includes no phone support, optimization assistance, or feature development options.
For companies that are depending on Nginx, there’s the big daddy package that starts at $6,600 a month or $70,000 a year. It has 24×7 support, covers an unlimited number of servers and an 8-hour response time for “severe” issues. Customers also get 12 hours of support calls per year, optimization assistance and can even get developer time to implement features (at an extra fee, of course).
All plans come with emergency bug fixes, updates, software updates and security fixes.
So far, the commercial entity hasn’t diverged from the open source Nginx offering. It will be interesting to see if the company also starts offering proprietary add-ons for Nginx or if they stick with a support-only model. Given the rapid adoption of Nginx, it seems likely that the company will be hearing from quite a few businesses that want a support contract.
If you’re using Nginx, I’d be curious to hear how smoothly your deployments have gone and if you’ve run into any major issues that would have benefited from support.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook’s Incredible Growth Story In Charts
Feb 3rd
Facebook’s IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We’ve already covered several angles.
Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public – from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I’ve highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.
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One of the most powerful things about Facebook is how many of its users log on every day.
Facebook’s IPO filing includes quarterly stats of its Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users, both worldwide and broken down by region. (Also, how about some appreciation for Facebook to sticking with “active” users in its stats, not just total, all-time sign-ups?)
Worldwide, you can see that 57% of the people who use Facebook within a given month also use Facebook on an average day, up from 47% in early 2009.
This varies, of course, by region, which gives an idea of how “sticky” Facebook is in different parts of the world. In the U.S. and Canada, it’s 70%. In Asia, where Facebook isn’t as established – but is growing fast – it’s only about 50%.
Facebook is increasingly a global story. Its user base is now almost equally concentrated in the four regions it breaks out. That’s a pretty big change from 2009, when it was primarily focused in the U.S. and Canada.
In 2011, about 30% of Facebook’s new users came from Asia, and about 40% in the “rest of world” category. Only about 10% of its new users came from the U.S. and Canada.
Facebook’s IPO filing also brings us new access to its finances. Here, we can see one reason why Facebook’s revenue growth (88% in 2011) is outpacing its user growth (39% in 2011) – because Facebook is bringing in more revenue per user than it did in the past.
How did that happen? Significant growth in both Facebook’s ad business (85% of its revenue) and its payments business (part of the 15% of “other” revenue).
Facebook’s future success, of course, relies on both its ability to attract new users and its ability to generate more revenue per user.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
SEO Services Announces Rapid Growth as Expert SEO Community Website – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Feb 2nd
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SEO Services Announces Rapid Growth as Expert SEO Community Website
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) SEO Services has rapidly grown as an expert SEO community website. Launched in early 2011 and managed by SEO expert Todd Bailey, it is a portal for industry experts and novices alike to share and learn about search engine optimization. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Search ad growth should motivate SEO investment – Brafton
Jan 31st
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Search ad growth should motivate SEO investment
Brafton As such, businesses are expected to spend 27 percent more on search advertising in 2012 than they did in 2011 and SEO marketers should be prepared to incorporate developing trends in their content marketing campaigns to fuel organic search results. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
[REPORT] Twitter, LinkedIn Will See Slower Revenue Growth
Jan 31st
Twitter and LinkedIn will continue to see strong advertisemnet growth, with Twitter’s revenue expected to nearly double between 2012 and 2014, according to a report by eMarketer Digital Intelligence.
The report comes against the backdrop of Facebook’s pending, initial public offering and illustrate that advertising models for social networks, seem to be working. Twitter gets 90% of its revenue from U.S. advertisiers, while LinkedIn depends more on foreign adverisers, with just 68% of its 2012 ad revenue expected to come from U.S. advertisers.
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The report did note, however, that both companies can expect growth rates to slow from their current levels. eMarketer is projecting 83% revenue growth for Twitter this year, down from 233% in 2011, and 46.1% revenue growth for LinkedIn, down from 95% in 2011.
Still, if eMarketer’s analysis of data from dozens of research firms, company information and industry trends is correct, Twitter will have revenue of $540 million by 2014. LinkedIn would have revenue of $405.6 million by 2014, fueled in part by an increase in U.S.-based advertising.
Speaking at the AllThingsD media conference on Monday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company has no plans to develop new revenue streams.
“We think we’re good where we’re at,” Costolo said, according to Wired. “We don’t feel like we need to add another component to the business in order to create the lasting company.”
LinkedIn has recently come under fire for its advertising practices. Its privacy policy allows the company to use users’ personal information in ads for the site. While the policy has been in effect for quite some time, it recently gained attention as messages highlighting it started spreading among users of the jobs and careers social network.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011
Jan 30th
Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.
“As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company’s blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. “This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006.” Independent analysts say this is indicative of the growth of the cloud in general and of Amazon’s striking dominance of the market.
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“Stunning, isn’t it?” Randy Bias, co-founder of Cloudscaling said to me about the news by email. “From 150% to almost 200% growth. That’s crazy. 500,000 requests per second at peak. Blows my mind.”
Bias says these are the big take-aways.
“S3 growth is accelerating, not just increasing. If other AWS services are accelerating similarly then we will see a major shift this year in AWS usage and likely revenue reporting in SEC filings.
“This is the largest storage system in the world bar none; there isn’t anything like it anywhere else that I’m aware of unless it’s some secret government/NSA vault.
“Check my math, but at 1Kbyte average per object, that would be 780PB of disk storage:
- 762,000,000,000 * 1024 (traditional KB)
- 780288000000000 / 1000 (KB for disk) / 1000 (MB for disk) / 1000 (GB for disk) / 1000 (PB for disk) [ disk capacity is in even 1,000 increments, not multiples of 2 ]
- That’s 780PB, but unclear if that’s replicated or unreplicated; probably replicated, which means 260PB of data with 3x replication.
- Average of 1Kbyte is probably too low.
- At 100TB per storage system that is 7,222 storage *servers*, each with 36 spindles at 3TB each; that might not be their configuration, but even if it’s 2 or 3 times as dense, that is a *lot* of storage servers.
- At those numbers, it’s a 26M/month business and a 300M/year run rate, which means it’s still roughly 30% of AWS revenue with EC2 being most of the rest.“I don’t understand how people can’t see this kind of thing and just have their jaw hit the floor. People are paying for this. At this rate they will have 2 TRILLION objects in another year and it will be a $600M/year business.”
What’s behind such numbers? Widespread technology change.
“What we are seeing is the geometric explosion of cloud growth from multiple points,” Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang told ReadWriteWeb.
“First, broad based adoption driven by consumerization of IT. Second, the shift from transaction to engagement – we have social, mobile, analytical, and other unstructured data. Third, true elasticity has come to fruition as the promise of the cloud gets delivered. People are taking to the cloud because the tools are easy to use and they don’t have time or money to provision expensive servers. Instead they are using elasticity, which was the original premise of AWS. We could see it happening last year but this leap in growth is tremendous.”
Dave Linthicum, CTO and Founder of Blue Mountain Labs, says Amazon’s dominance is clear. “The rapid growth of AWS S3 is pretty much in-line with what I’m seeing in enterprises adopting cloud computing. The reality is that they are the 800 pound gorilla, and continue to gain weight. Unless they do something stupid, they are the storage provider to beat.”
Ray Wang concurs. “There are only a few companies in the world who can compete with Amazon,” he told me by IM tonight.
“It has established itself as one of the leading contenders. The barriers of entry are high. Very few folks can afford to build the data centers, the software infrastructure, and momentum to be profitable. Amazon is in the same league as Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. The only other folks that could do it if they woke up are the telco’s – but we’ve all been telling them that for years. They haven’t paid attention.”
Amazon’s Barr explains the growth thusly. “Although we definitely made it easier for you to delete objects using Multi-Object Deletion and Object Expiration, we also gave you plenty of ways to upload new objects using Multipart upload, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Import/Export,” he wrote in his blog post. He concluded by noting that running a system so complex is hard work and pointed to open jobs at AWS.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Amazon S3 Reports Record Breaking Growth
Jan 30th
Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.
“As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company’s blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. “This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006.” Independent analysts say this is indicative of the growth of the cloud in general and of Amazon’s striking dominance of the market.
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“Stunning, isn’t it?” Randy Bias, co-founder of Cloudscaling said to me about the news by email. “From 150% to almost 200% growth. That’s crazy. 500,000 requests per second at peak. Blows my mind.”
Bias says these are the big take-aways.
“S3 growth is accelerating, not just increasing. If other AWS services are accelerating similarly then we will see a major shift this year in AWS usage and likely revenue reporting in SEC filings.
“This is the largest storage system in the world bar none; there isn’t anything like it anywhere else that I’m aware of unless it’s some secret government/NSA vault.
“Check my math, but at 1Kbyte average per object, that would be 780PB of disk storage:
- 762,000,000,000 * 1024 (traditional KB)
- 780288000000000 / 1000 (KB for disk) / 1000 (MB for disk) / 1000 (GB for disk) / 1000 (PB for disk) [ disk capacity is in even 1,000 increments, not multiples of 2 ]
- That’s 780PB, but unclear if that’s replicated or unreplicated; probably replicated, which means 260PB of data with 3x replication.
- Average of 1Kbyte is probably too low.
- At 100TB per storage system that is 7,222 storage *servers*, each with 36 spindles at 3TB each; that might not be their configuration, but even if it’s 2 or 3 times as dense, that is a *lot* of storage servers.
- At those numbers, it’s a 26M/month business and a 300M/year run rate, which means it’s still roughly 30% of AWS revenue with EC2 being most of the rest.“I don’t understand how people can’t see this kind of thing and just have their jaw hit the floor. People are paying for this. At this rate they will have 2 TRILLION objects in another year and it will be a $600M/year business.”
What’s behind such numbers? Widespread technology change.
“What we are seeing is the geometric explosion of cloud growth from multiple points,” Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang told ReadWriteWeb.
“First, broad based adoption driven by consumerization of IT. Second, the shift from transaction to engagement – we have social, mobile, analytical, and other unstructured data. Third, true elasticity has come to fruition as the promise of the cloud gets delivered. People are taking to the cloud because the tools are easy to use and they don’t have time or money to provision expensive servers. Instead they are using elasticity, which was the original premise of AWS. We could see it happening last year but this leap in growth is tremendous.”
Dave Linthicum, CTO and Founder of Blue Mountain Labs, says Amazon’s dominance is clear. “The rapid growth of AWS S3 is pretty much in-line with what I’m seeing in enterprises adopting cloud computing. The reality is that they are the 800 pound gorilla, and continue to gain weight. Unless they do something stupid, they are the storage provider to beat.”
Ray Wang concurs. “There are only a few companies in the world who can compete with Amazon,” he told me by IM tonight.
“It has established itself as one of the leading contenders. The barriers of entry are high. Very few folks can afford to build the data centers, the software infrastructure, and momentum to be profitable. Amazon is in the same league as Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. The only other folks that could do it if they woke up are the telco’s – but we’ve all been telling them that for years. They haven’t paid attention.”
Amazon’s Barr explains the growth thusly. “Although we definitely made it easier for you to delete objects using Multi-Object Deletion and Object Expiration, we also gave you plenty of ways to upload new objects using Multipart upload, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Import/Export,” he wrote in his blog post. He concluded by noting that running a system so complex is hard work and pointed to open jobs at AWS.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Report Affirms Strong Q4 Search Growth In 2011, Offers Additional Insights
Jan 27th
Marketers have had a couple weeks to digest their fourth quarter numbers and assess their successes and failures from a period that can be a whirlwind, particularly in the retail sector. Now, with Google’s Q4 earnings report and Yahoo’s out, we’re getting a chance to compare our…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Driven By iPhone and iPad Growth, Apple Revenue Topped $46 Billion Last Quarter
Jan 24th
In its quarterly earnings call this afternoon, Apple threw around quite a few very large numbers. For starters, the company brought in $46.3 billion dollars in the last quarter, which was a 73% increase over the previous year. In terms of profit, they netted $13.1 billion, a 118% year-over-year increase and a number that exceeds Google’s entire quarterly revenue, as one observer pointed out.
By far the biggest chunk of revenue came from the iPhone and related products. This isn’t surprising considering the highly successful launch of the iPhone 4S in October, which landed at the same time as iOS 5 and iCloud. The quarter on which Apple was reporting today also included the holiday shopping season, which is always a peak time for smartphones, MP3 players and tablets.
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In total, the company sold 37 million iPhones throughout the quarter, which exceeded those sold in the same time period last year by 128%. Apple CEO Tim Cook cited the “breathtaking” customer reception to the iPhone 4S, as well as the launch of Siri, iOS 5 and improved camera optics.
It also didn’t hurt that in the previous quarter, sales missed expectations due to the fact that so many consumers were holding out for the next iPhone. That device was finally launched during the last quarter, and it was a huge one for Apple. In January, the iPhone 4S began shipping in China and now has a presence in over 90 countries.
iPad: Still Dominant, But What About the Competition?
The next biggest growth area for Apple was the iPad. Taken together, the iPad and iPhone product lines now account for 72% of the company’s quarterly revenue. This is a trend that’s been underway for awhile and the share of revenue generated by the iPad and iPhone just seems to keep growing. The stats speak volumes about the explosive growth of smartphones and tablets in general, two markets that Apple has played a massive role in.
The company pointed to the enterprise and educational institutions as two key sources of growth for the iPad. The latter point is no shock in light of last week’s launch of iBooks 2, iBooks Author and an enhanced iTunes U app. While it was received with mixed reactions, the move marked Apple’s biggest formal foray into the education space, where it intends to use the iPad as a way to deliver interactive digital textbooks to students.
When asked about other players in the tablet space, Cook said that the company doesn’t “really see these limited function tablets, these e-readers, as being in the same category.” In other words, it’s not worried about the Kindle Fire or any other Android-based tablets. The iPad may continue to be overwhelmingly dominant, but we’ll see in a few weeks whether the iPad 3′s features or price point are changing in response to any of the other players on the market.
While less dramatic than its iPad and iPhone results, Apple did see quarterly and year-over-year growth in almost every other category, including Mac desktops and laptops.
The only category that saw a decrease from 2012 was the iPod, although it’s worth noting that iPod sales did increase notably from the prior quarter. Year over year, however, the devices are no longer a huge source of growth for Apple, whose smartphones and tablets include all of the functionality of an iPod, in addition to access to 550,000 apps available in the iTunes App Store. Despite being overshadowed by its more sophisticated siblings, the iPod is still the top-selling MP3 player in many major markets.
At this point, Apple is sitting on a ton of money. The company now boasts $97.6 billion in cash, but Cook declined to comment on how they plan on spending that.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Apple’s Growth Rate Is Simply Incredible… And It’s Accelerating
Jan 24th
There are plenty of impressive stats in Apple’s December quarter earnings report, such as 37 million iPhones shipped, $46 billion of overall sales, and $13 billion of profit.
But Apple’s most impressive stat continues to be its growth rate: Apple is not only huge, but it is growing at a rate far greater than its peers. And, even more incredible, its growth rate is accelerating.
As a company gets bigger, or as a market matures, its growth rate typically falls. It’s only natural: The numbers get bigger, so the percentage of change eventually shrinks. But for Apple, during the Christmas quarter — its busiest time of the year — that hasn’t happened yet.
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Specifically, last quarter, Apple’s overall sales totaled $46.3 billion, an increase of 73% over the previous December quarter. That’s an acceleration over Apple’s growth rate from the December 2010 quarter, when it posted 71% growth. And that was better than the year before, when it grew 32%. That, too, was faster than the year before, when Apple posted a 6% growth rate in the bowels of the recession. So for the third year in a row, Apple has accelerated its Christmas quarter sales growth.
Why is this so impressive? Because maintaining your growth rate when you’re Apple’s size — never mind increasing it — takes a lot of work!
This past Christmas, Apple needed to add an extra $20 billion in new sales to grow by 73%. The year before, it “only” needed to generate an additional $11 billion in new business to grow by 71%. It’s pretty astounding, especially considering that Apple’s product lineup didn’t even change that much last year.
The reason it happened, of course, was the iPhone 4S “perfect storm.” Not only was it a new iPhone, but it launched during what is already Apple’s busiest time of the year, the holiday quarter. And it expanded Apple’s footprint to new carriers, such as Sprint. Add pent-up demand to the mix, and Apple was easily able to shatter its iPhone sales record. Then consider that the iPhone is Apple’s biggest business by revenue and profits, and the big numbers fall into place.
Can it happen again? It’s only going to get harder. To match this year’s growth — 73% — Apple’s December 2012 quarter would have to beat $80 billion in sales. That’s a lot of iPhones. The way the smartphone market is growing, and the way the iPad looks like it’s going to do, anything’s possible. But it’s not going to be easy.
More charts: Apple’s Monster Quarter In Charts
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
