Since early last year, top social media and Information Technology companies have been making social media news headlines because of several ambitious acquisitions and investments in new technology.
With the market growth in developed countries slowing down, many companies are looking to the third-world and the market potential that it represents.
As of December 31 last year, 4,156,932,140 or 42.3% of the world’s population are internet users. This represents a 741% growth from the 360,985,492 users in the year 2000.
As more and more advancements are being made in the field of information technology, more and more people who didn’t have internet access before, are now able to make use of the internet on a daily basis.
And the internet is playing a bigger and bigger role in our everyday lives. Things that we previously would have had to do manually, can now be done with the click of a button.
Search engines have made accessing information quicker and easier.
Shopping can be done online without having to go out yourself.
People are dropping out of the rat race that is the Monday morning commute and building lucrative and rewarding careers from the comfort of their homes.
Because of how easy it is to set up your own blog, millions of people now have a great avenue to express themselves and showcase their talent online.
Top blog-creation websites like Tumblr and WordPress are now being used to manage 101.7 million and 63 million blogs respectively.
One of the biggest developments is that social media networks have allowed us to stay in touch with our loved ones, in ways that we couldn’t possibly have imagined before.
Bringing Internet to Every
Person on Earth
The latest findings show that 74% of all adults who have regular internet access use social networking websites.
And though the growth in the number of adult social media website users is slowing down in the first-world, there is still a large untapped market in third-world countries where a lot of people do not have the ease-of-access that those in wealthier countries have.
That’s why social media marketing and other internet companies are investing in the development of technology that will bring internet to the “next 5 billion people”.
Big companies are investing in satellite, laser, and drone technology that will give people even in the most remote areas access to the internet.
Facebook, for example, made social media news headlines when it acquired solar-powered drone maker, Ascenta as part of its plan to bring internet access to every person on the planet.
“Here we use things like Facebook to share news and catch up with our friends, but there, they’re going to use it to decide what kind of government they want, get access to health care for the first time ever, connect with family hundred’s of miles away that they haven’t seen in decades,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an interview on CNN Money.
“Getting access to the internet is a really big deal,” he said.
Since 2012, Facebook has been focusing on acquiring social media apps that gained too much traction in the audience. There was the Instagram deal, the very crucial WhatsApp, tried to buy Snap, and the TBH, an app intended for teens.
Meanwhile, Twitter was rumoured to be interested in acquiring the popular selfie app, “Shots.”
Later on, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto made social media news when tweeted what was allegedly meant to be a private message.
In the tweet, Noto said that he still thought that “we should buy them.”
This allegedly refers to the social media company’s plan to buy “Shots”.
According to a CNBC source, the app had users that number more than 3 million, two-thirds of whom are women under age of 24.
Statistics for Websites Using CMSs
As you can see, WordPress is still the most dominating CMS technology withholding 60 to 70 percent market share. Taking all websites into consideration, WordPress is used by nearly 26% of all websites in the entire world. Impressive? Leeds website designers from Harrison Mann team curated a list of 51 reasons why to use WP for your website. Here is the source.
Internet technology has the immense future possibilities to expand and we’ll
probably witness even more intelligent information at the single click of a
button. That’s the power of WEB – the only limitation that can diminish the
potential is that of our imagination.