90% of the data on the internet has been created since 2016, according to an IBM Marketing Cloud study. People, businesses, and devices have all become data factories that are pumping out incredible amounts of information to the web each day.
This post has been tracking the growth of data created on the internet for several years, and have updated the information for 2019 to show you how much data that is being created on the internet – every day!
The Amount of Data Created Each Day on the Internet in 2019
In 2014, there were 2.4 billion internet users. That number grew to 3.4 billion by 2016, and in 2017 300 million internet users were added. As of June 2019 there are now over 4.4 billion internet users. This is an 83% increase in the number of people using the internet in just five years!
Not only are there more people using the internet, but they are using it in many different ways.
Each minute of every day the following happens on the internet:
- Social Media is HUGE – Reports show that almost 300 million new social media users each year. That is 550 new social media users each minute.
- Since 2013, the number of Tweets each minute has increased 58% to more than 474,000 Tweets PER MINUTE in 2019!
- Youtube usage more than tripled from 2014-2016 with users uploading 400 hours of new video each minute of every day! Now, in 2019, users are watching 4,333,560 videos every minute.
- 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!
- Instagram users upload over 100 million photos and videos overyday. That is 69,444 million posts every minute!
- Users spend nearly one hour a day on Facebook, but Instagram and Snapchat are quickly catching up.
- Since 2013, the number of Facebook Posts shared each minute has increased 22%, from 2.5 Million to 3 million posts per minute in 2016. This number has increased more than 300 percent, from around 650,000 posts per minute in 2011!
- Every minute on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded.
- There are over 38,000 status updates on Facebook every minute.
- Facebook users also click the like button on more than 4 million posts every minute!, and the Facebook like button has been pressed 13 trillion times.
- Over 3.5 Billion Google searches are conducted worldwide each minute of everyday. That is 2 trillion searches per year worldwide. That is over 40,000 search queries per second!
- Worldwide over 100 million messages are sent every minute via SMS and in-app messages!
- 26 billion texts were sent each day by 27 million people in the US. That is 94 texts per day per person in the US in 2017.
If we do some quick calculations, we can see the amount of data created on the internet each day. There are 1440 minutes per day…so that means there are approximately:
- 1,209,600 new data producing social media users each day.
- 682 million tweets per day!
- More than 4 million hours of content uploaded to Youtube every day, with users watching 5.97 billion hours of Youtube videos each day.
- 67,305,600 Instagram posts uploaded each day
- There are over 2 billion monthly active facebook users, compared to 1.44 billion at the start of 2015 and 1.65 at the start of 2016.
- Facebook has 1.58 billion daily active users on average as of Q2 2019
- 4.3 BILLION Facebook messages posted daily!
- 5.76 BILLION Facebook likes every day.
Email Use continues to Rise
Don’t think with these increases in social media, that email is going away anytime soon! Email use continues to grow. The Email Statistics Report 2019-2023 by the Radicati Group confirms this – 293 billion emails are sent daily in 2019, and this is expected to grow by 4.2% yearly to 347 billion in 2023. According to the same report there are 3.9 billion email users in 2019, and will increase to 4.4 billion by the end of 2023.
Mobile Device Data
- The amount of mobile data is also blowing up – at the start of 2014, mobile phones/tablets uploaded and downloaded around 2 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes) of data. At the start of 2017, data created on mobile devices quadrupled to over 8 exabytes.
- At the start of 2017, there were 394 billion mobile internet users. There are now over 5 billion mobile device users in 2019. A 67% penetration of the entire global population.
- Approximately 21.9 billion text messages are sent each day in 2017, compared to 7 billion in 2016 – a 17% increase in just one year.
Data created by the Internet of Things (IOT)
Devices are a huge source of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create every day – not just mobile devices, but Smart TV’s, cars, airplanes, you name it – the internet of things is producing an increasing amount of data.
- IDC forecasts a 3 percent growth in wearable devices from 2018 – 201. There were 28.3 million wearable devices sold in 2016, and estimates that 198 million will be sold in 2019. A 600% increase in just 3 years.
- Smart watches were 44.2% of the wearables market in 2019, and that is aniticipated to increase to 47% by 20233
- Between 2016 and 2022, IoT devices are expected to increase at a rate of 21 percent, driven by new use cases. In 2018, mobile phones are expected to be surpassed in numbers by IoT devices, which include connected cars, machines, meters, wearables and other consumer electronics.
- Pratt & Whitney’s Geared Turbo Fan (GTF) engine is fitted with 5,000 sensors and can generate up to 10GB of data each second
- Uber is releasing 6 years of transportation data to cities to help them plan public transit
- Business insider predicts that by 2020 75 percent of cars will come with built-in IoT connectivity.
Growth in Data Generating Services
The growth in data and the way it can be used is also changing the way business is being done and the services that organizations can offer due to an enhanced ability to produce, capture, and understand data.
- Amazon is dominating the marketplace – Amazon processes $373 MILLION in sales every day in 2017, compared to about 120 million amazon sales in 2014
- Each month more than 206 million people around the world get on their devices and visit Amazon.com.
- By the end of 2016, Uber had 40 million monthly active users. In 2019 there were 75 million Uber passengers, who are served by a total of 3.9 million drivers
- 14 million Uber trips are completed each day
- Venmo has 40 million users and processes $68,493 in transactions EVERY minute.
How Micro Focus Can Help You Monitor Employee Generated Data
Hidden in all this data are business insights that can trigger explosive growth. The problem is that finding them is like finding a needle in a haystack. That’s why early adopters are focusing on big data analytics and content management.
Research from IDC shows that 80% of worldwide data produced will be unstructured, meaning that it is typically text heavy and does not follow a predefined data model. That’s where big data analytics and visibility come into play – they give context to massive amounts of unstructured data, which helps find the needle of insight in the haystack of information.
Micro Focus ControlPoint is designed to help organizations to better manage their unstructured information repositories by optimizing how and where unstructured information is managed, migrated and protected. By implementing ControlPoint, you can focus on better managing content for cost control, risk management and preservation of valuable business information.
The future innovators and market leaders across all industries will be the ones who can take this data and make the most out of it. Whether that’s gaining insights for a marketing campaign or a new R&D project, the internet and big data have the answers, and one thing is certain – tools are going to be critical in deciphering all of that information.
[Originally published in 2014 on the GWAVA blog – brought up to date August 6, 2019.]
