By the Numbers: 14 Stats About the Year of Mobile and Social

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Digital marketing and advertising continued to generate intense interest in 2011. Here's a snapshot of those trends, based on year-end blog posts, reports, and studies.

$141.6B: Value of 3,026 transactions made in the marketing, media, technology, and service industries in 2011, up by 152 percent compared to the previous year. (Source: Petsky Prunier investment bank.) Top deals included Hewlett-Packard's purchase of Autonomy for $12 billion and Microsoft's purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion.

$37.2B: E-commerce spending for the November-December 2011 holiday season, an increase of 15 percent compared to the same period in 2010. (Source: comScore)

800M: Number of active users on Facebook as of December 2011, up from 500 million in July 2010. (Source: Facebook)

135M: Number of LinkedIn members as of November 2011, up from about 85 million in late 2010.

130.8M: Number of unique viewers on YouTube in November 2011, making it the top online video destination. It was followed by distant No. 2 Vevo with 42.7 million unique viewers and Yahoo with 34.4 million. (Source: Nielsen)

62M: Number of Google+ users by year's end. (Source: Paul Allen)

48M: Number of times Volkswagen's commercial, "The Force," was viewed on YouTube, making it the ninth most popular video on YouTube in 2011. Ranked number one was Rebecca Black's music video, "Friday." (Source: YouTube Rewind 2011)

36M: Number of people who "like" Coca-Cola on Facebook, earning it the distinction of being one of the most popular brands on the social network.

17.7M: Number of Lady Gaga followers on Twitter, making her No. 1 on that social network. (Source: Twitter Counter)

15M: Number of people on Foursquare as of December 2011. (Source: Foursquare)

500K: Number of apps in Apple's App Store as of mid-December. That compares to 400,000 apps for the Android operating system. (Sources: Apple, Distimo)

29: Strategic acquisitions made by Google, the highest number in the marketing, media, and technology sector. Acquisitions included AdMeld, DealyDeal.de, Moblyng, and Next New Networks. (Source: Petsky Prunier)

46.9%: Portion of smartphone subscribers using Google's Android operating system for the three-month period ended November 2011, an increase of 18.7 percentage points compared to the same period in 2010. For November 2011, Apple accounted for 28.7 percent of all smartphone subscriptions; RIM, 16.6 percent, and Microsoft, 5.2 percent. (Source: comScore)

40%: Portion of mobile visitors using iPads to access user-generated product reviews on the Bazaarvoice platform. That compares to 30 percent using iPhones and 25 percent using devices with the Android operating system.