The previous blog post looked at Big Data and how industry experts are defining it, forecasting its growth and evaluating the tremendous impact it will have on all industries and of course on all of our lives. In this post we thought it would be fun to provide a perspective on just how much data is already gushing through our networks every moment of every day. The title “The Ever Growing Deluge of Data and How It Never Sleeps” probably needs no explanation.
We live in a digital universe. The data we produce is growing 40% a year and will continue to expand unabated well into the next decade. Some industry experts have noted that by 2020 there will be almost as many digital bits as there are stars in our physical universe. This extraordinary amount of data we create and copy annually is expected to reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes by the end of this decade alone.
The reason for such growth is caused not only by the ever increasing number of people and businesses working and playing online, but also because of all the various smart devices and apps which are connected to the Internet. New technologies continue to evolve that suddenly allow people to share and create information in ways that were never previously possible.
We were curious as to just how much data is created every minute across the major Internet services in today’s world. One minute seems like an insignificant amount of time, but when you look at it in terms of how much data is actually created, the results may astound you. For example did you know that every sixty seconds…
o Instagram users share 216,000 new photos
o Facebook users share 2,460,000 new pieces of content
o YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video
o Twitter users send over 277,000 tweets
And in that same minute, email users send 204 million messages, Amazon makes about $83,000 in sales online and Apple users download nearly 50,000 apps. The world’s data pool is expanding faster than we can comprehend driven by all our clicks, likes, tweets, photos, blog posts, and online transactions.
The folks at Domo created the infographic below which succinctly summarizes these incredible amounts of data that are generated each minute on the internet. Indeed we would have to agree…data never sleeps!