Ten years ago in 2004, blogs ruled the internet and "blog" was named the word of the year by Merriam-Webster. The same year, Newstex launched with a simple goal---to provide real-time news and commentary, collected from the world’s best authoritative sources, to customers who need reliable information but don’t have time to search for it.A lot has changed both in digital storytelling and at Newstex. Today, there are over 600 million websites, and Facebook reaches one out of two people on the planet who have internet access. Just last month, I wrote an article for Newstex with some of the most amazing statistics about the growth of the web. For example:

• Google processes 20 petabytes of information per day.
• More than five exabytes of content are created each day.
• 86 million websites have been built using WordPress.
• Greater than 39% of the world’s population uses the internet (2.7 billion people).
• Facebook users share nearly 2.5 million pieces of content per minute.
• Approximately four billion hours of online video are watched each month.

Furthermore, 2014 is expected to be a year filled with huge milestones. For example, the number of mobile devices in use is expected to surpass the number of people on earth with 7.7 billion mobile phones and tablets compared to 7.1 billion people. Also, in 2014, mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop internet traffic, and mobile screen time surpassed television screen time.Take a look at the infographic from Carabiner Communications below. It's filled with statistics about the past 10 years of digital storytelling and how things have changed. For example, social media really started gaining traction in 2005 while 2010 marked the year that 43% of news editors thought "web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of a 'newspaper' newsroom. Two year later, 2012 was dubbed the year of content curation, while 2013 became known as the year when visual content was king. In 2014, mobile and wearable-technology are the hot topics.

For Newstex, the past 10 years have seen growth and change. Today, Newstex offers aggregated news and full-text feeds from thousands of media sites, online magazines, premium blogs, Twitter profiles, Facebook Pages, and video content from editorially-selected, authoritative news, corporate, and independent publishers. In 2014, Newstex is doing exciting things related to mobile content and apps as well as expanding internationally. Let's see what the next 10 years bring!Image: JD Baskin licensed CC BY-2.0