Of the 133 Million blogs that are currently on the web 80% are abandoned within a month. The average rate of updating is 2-3 times per week. 85% use tags, just beating the 82% that use images to make blog posts look more appealing. Even though 61% use blogging to supplement their income, 70% say that personal satisfaction is how they measure their blogging success.
Didn’t you enjoy reading the above paragraph? Statistics are pretty amazing in that they fascinate us and give us a sense of having understood the topic at hand so much better. They say an image is worth a thousand words, I believe that a statistic must be worth at least 500!
Knowing this, I have often wanted to include interesting statistics in blog posts, presentations or other communicative ……. , but where do you find statistics? Who actually does all the counting? I would like to offer my answer to that question below.
Using Google blogsearch I found a couple of blogs offering specific topic oriented statistics, which of course is very useful. The statistics above for example come from this post and are just a few of many more the author has managed to collect.
This image comes from an incredible website that collects data on Internet usage. Would you have expected Asia to so thoroughly outnumber the US in Internet user? I was pretty surprised. Click on the image to see more of where that came from.
A great source for statistics is on the homepages of large organizations. The International Monetary Fund, for instance, offers plenty of economic data in their ‘data and statistics’ section. When it comes to general population statistics, the World Health Organization has almost everything you need on their web page.
The most ingenious statistics website I could find was www.informationisbeautiful.net. Through often interactive visualizations complex and often utterly outrageous statistics are displayed.
Just to give you an example:
Having seen this, I believe I will be able to integrate a lot more statistics into my future pieces of writing and perhaps I helped you find a couple of interesting things too.
unitedtribes 
Johann,
Nice post! You are right, statistics help rendering an article more informative and at the same time make it appear more professional. On the other hand, I think that they should be chosen with care due to the impact they have on a statement. You made a good job leading the reader through your text and explaining both the importance as well as the provenance of them and giving advice on where to find a lot of interesting figures.