The Race to 50 Million: How Fast Tech Spreads

You've probably seen this factoid shared a thousand times: Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Television did it in 13. The World Wide Web? A mere 4 years. It's the perfect illustration of how technology adoption keeps accelerating—each new medium spreading faster than the last.

There's just one problem: these numbers are kind of made up.

The Morgan Stanley Mystery

The famous comparison traces back to a Morgan Stanley report from the 1990s. The problem? The report never clearly defined what it was measuring. Were we counting global users or just Americans? What counted as a "user"—someone who owned a radio, or someone who listened occasionally? And when exactly did the clock start ticking?

As technology analyst Geir Hannemyr pointed out, these statistics have a curious habit of staying exactly the same even when the geographical region changes. Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users in America. Also 38 years globally. Also 38 years in Europe, apparently. The numbers never budge, which is... suspicious.

But the Core Idea Is Real

Here's the thing: even if the specific numbers are fuzzy, the trend is absolutely real. Technology adoption has been accelerating dramatically.

Radio broadcasting began in 1920 with KDKA, the first commercial station. It took roughly 25 years to reach near-majority adoption in the U.S. Television, starting its true consumer rollout in 1945 after WWII production resumed, spread significantly faster. And the internet? Once Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web in 1989 and Netscape made it user-friendly in 1993, adoption was explosive.

By 1997, the internet had indeed crossed 50 million users worldwide—about 4 years after the release of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser that made the internet accessible to regular people.

Why It Matters

The comparison might be imprecise, but it captures something profound: we're living through a continuous acceleration of how quickly new technologies spread. More recent platforms make the early internet look slow:

• Facebook reached 50 million users in roughly 3 years
• Instagram did it in about 1.5 years
• Pokémon GO hit 50 million users in 19 days
• ChatGPT? Just 2 months

So while you should take those specific 38-13-4 numbers with a grain of salt, the story they tell is real: each generation of technology spreads faster than the last, and we're nowhere near the limit yet.