2689% APR??

2689% APR, and Other Ridiculous Sounding Statistics

ONE of the big financial talking points of 2010 was payday loans, dividing the opinions of those who saw them as predatory and those who saw them as a legitimate, and sometimes necessary, way of managing money. 

One of the best-known payday loan companies in the UK, brought to the attention of the public by a recent advertising campaign, was offering loans with a rate of 2689% APR.

At a glance, that sounds like a ludicrous rate – but of course it is because it is being expressed as an annual rate, when of course payday loans are generally accepted as being a short-term solution.

So, not as ridiculous as it initially appears then? Sensible reasons for taking out a payday loan include: to avoid defaulting on your current account or mortgage or to pay off more pressing debt which might carry an even higher interest rate.

On the other hand, they can only ever be a short-term solution because of their high APR. If you need something to help you out in the longer-term, you ought to consider the overdraft on your current account or even a credit card, if your circumstances permit it.

Whatever your opinion on payday loans, 2689% APR is certainly a shocking statistic at first glance.

Here are some more absurd and impressive statistics about the web, communication and digital entertainment.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site, created in 2004 has more than 600 million active users, as of January 2011.If we take an current estimate of the earth’s population as 6.9 billion, then nearly 9% of the human race are signed up to the site.

The number of Facebook users is around ten times the population of the United Kingdom, and around twice the population of the United States of America.

The Web

According to research by Analysys Mason in November 2010, more than 16 billion internet-enabled devices will be connected up to the web by 2020.

Text messaging

The total number of text messages sent globally tripled between 2007 and 2010, from an estimated 1.8 trillion to 6.1 trillion. This equates almost 200,000 text messages sent every second. (According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU), October 2010)

Online video

According to the YouTube blog, 35 hours of new video are uploaded to the site every single minute. Taking this ratio further, 2100 minutes of video are uploaded every hour, and 50,400 minutes (or 35 days’ worth) of YouTube video are uploaded each day. (And that’s just YouTube!)

Online music

According to digitalmusicnews.com, worldwide; over 11.7 billion songs have now been downloaded from iTunes, from over 160m iTunes accounts (with credit cards) across 23 countries.

Web users

According to International Telecommunications Union, (as cited by pingdom.com, October 2010) by the end of 2010, there will be 2 billion internet users worldwide. There were only 361 million Internet users in 2000, in the entire world. For perspective, that’s barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today. 

Louise Tillotson is a financial author and blogger in the UK. Recently foraying into social media, she is now a regular Twitterer and can often be found hunting for new people to follow. Follow her @louisetillotson on Twitter.

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