Most of us consider ourselves computer literate if we can check our email, update our social network status and send text messages. If you are really savvy then you might be able to build a web page, program a software application or even edit the Windows registry. However, few of us ever consider how much data we actually consume, so we thought it might be interesting to see just how much data is being pumped through those ever expanding inter-web data pipelines every minute of every day.
Before we jump into this data, let’s first take a look back to where it all began. Almost half a century ago, the Internet actually started as a military project called DARPA-NET. It was back in the late 1960’s when a division of the Department of Defense called the Advanced Research Projects Agency created one of the first decentralized computer networks that was used to transmit research papers between scientists. This was the first time that a computer network of that nature had been developed, and it slowly began to grow into a community of those people who used the network to download and upload increasingly complex data.
Today we take for granted the fact that you can use your web browser to access information on a computer server located thousands of miles away and receive near instantaneous replies to any query.
So we asked the question: what happens in one minute online? The results are quite astounding!
To illustrate, every 60 seconds, Google processes 2.4 million searches, 700,000 people login to Facebook and Amazon sells over $200,000 of physical and digital goods.
According to marketing firm Excelacom, the numbers for 2016 have significantly increased from what happened in an Internet minute last year. This demonstrates how we as consumers are continuously utilizing the Internet more and more each day, pressuring Internet speeds to increase as well. For example, compared to 2015, we are now seeing:
Uber – 695 more rides per minute (100% increase)
Amazon – $83,836 more in sales per minute (70% increase)
Spotify – 24,752 more hours of music uploaded per minute (186% increase)
The sheer amount of data being sent/received is staggering and shows no signs of slowing down. This volume of information is part of the reason why companies are prioritizing their ability to process and interpret Big Data more than ever before.
The infographic by Excelacom (below) illustrates just how staggering these numbers are.
Credit: The above infographic was sourced from Excelacom at:
http://www.excelacom.com/resources/blog/2016-update-what-happens-in-one-internet-minute