smileys statistics

We all know about smileys, but are you aware of just how big a phenomenon it is. It seems to create a sort of love or hate response in a lot of people but the statistics clearly show that there is an awful lot of people who love them. Unfortunately, it is not possible to get the statistics for the number of people who hate them – but maybe, someone will.

There are a couple of easily accessible statistics which demonstrate the extent to which people are using smileys and that is the number of searches made every day for the little guys. According to one of the search engine monitoring software packages that I have looked at today, the number of searches for each of the terms below is as follows:

Smiley 245,549
Smileys 73,637
Emoticons 164,457
Emoticon 89,837

That represents a TOTAL of 573,480 and that is a daily average. Let me repeat that, it is a daily average. That is over half a million searches for smileys every single day. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.

Now, before you go hunting for your calculators, let me work it out for you. The number of searches per year is a whopping 209,320,200. That is over 209 million!

Now I should say at this point that I have only included the searches for the basic smiley and emoticon words. I have another research project going on to investigate the total number of searches including all the variations of searches on smileys that people make. I can only guess at this stage, but the total total figure could easily be double; i.e. over 400 million. That is a lot of searches for cute little fellows.

So we have established that there are a lot of people looking for smileys or emoticons. What is equally staggering is the number of websites or web pages which are answering the call. The number of pages that Google has identified for each of the same search terms is as follows:

Smiley 39.4 million
Smileys 22.6 million
Emoticons 28.8 million
Emoticons 8.6 million

Now, there is undoubtedly a lot of the same pages counted in each of these figures so it is quite difficult to work out the number of unique web pages which answer the call, but using some educated guesswork it is likely to be in the 50 – 60 million mark. (I am prepared to admit that this guess could be wildly wrong, by the way). Now, that is a lot of pages for some cute little fellows that you add to emails. Imagine all the work that has gone into creating these pages. It must be an industry in its own right!

There is no disguising the fact that smileys are big business. These figures show both the demand and the huge industry out there trying to satisfy the demand. The smileys statistical significance is confirmed.