On the occasion of the first anniversary as the chief executive officer, Larry Page shared a letter with Google’s investors. He took over the CEO job at last April after making the announcement in January 2011. You should read the letter for yourself. It is a bit of corporate-speak, but nevertheless it feels like it is from a guy who feels happy with his first 12 months in the job. While reading the letter, some stats caught my eye that are simply staggering, regardless of how one feels about the company.
- Over 850,000 Android devices are activated daily through a network of 55 manufacturers and more than 300 carriers.
- Google Chrome browser has over 200 million users.
- Google launched Gmail in 2004 and now is used by more than 350 million people. Over 5,000 new businesses and educational establishments sign up for Gmail every day.
- YouTube has over 800 million monthly users who upload an hour of video per second.
- Google’s mobile advertising grew to a run rate of over $2.5 billion by the third quarter of 2011 — two and a half times more than at the same point in 2010.
- Google has paid out over $30 billion to support content on the Web since the launch of Adsense over a decade ago.
- Google Translate is eight years old and according to Page “now allows anyone to translate text in an instant between any two of 64 languages—including Hindi, Arabic and Chinese. That’s actually 4032 different pairs of languages you can translate!”
Of course what would the letter be without the CEO pointing out his achievements. Page wanted to focus the company on social and optimize the operations around fewer products. So it isn’t a surprise that he pointed out that “we have closed or combined over 30 products, including projects like Knol and Sidewiki.”
And as for Google+, the mandate for the company, Page pointed out that there are “over 120 Google+ integrations to date (including Google Search, YouTube and Android), we are on the right track. Well over 100 million users are active on Google+.”