Big Data facts – How much data is out there?
Today, we decided to be a little “meta” and collect some data on Big Data. Read on to discover specific statistics related to internet users around the world. We’ve also thrown in some data predictions in terms of what the future has in store for us. Enjoy!
User data
How many people are actually using online platforms? We’ll tell you. Below you’ll find aggregated numbers from an array of sources. Feel free to click on the statistics to backtrack to the source.
- In June 2017, 3,885,567,617 internet users were recorded. This means that 51.7% of the world’s population is online.
- 50% of the earth’s population is on social media, with a total of 2,789 billion people.
- Let’s talk e-commerce. As of this year (2017), there are 1,6 billion active e-commerce users. This equates to a 22% global penetration.
- Finally, in regards to users, 4,917 billion mobile users have been active this year, meaning a 66% penetration.
Online activity
Alright, so we’ve discussed how many people are online. But let’s dive into some statistics related to what they are actually doing.
- In total, 2.7 Zettabytes of data exists in our digital universe. So, how much is this? “A terabyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes. A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes. An exabyte is equal to 1,024 petabytes. A zettabyte is equal to 1,024 exabytes.” (courtesy of DnetMHZ).
- 149, 513 emails are sent every minute.
- 3,3 million (undoubtedly extremely insightful) Facebook posts are created every minute.
- 3.8 Google million searches are performed each minute.
- Each minute, 65,972 Instagram photos are uploaded.
- 448,800 Tweets are constructed. How often? Every minute.
- 500 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute.
Future Predictions
So let’s look into the future. Albeit, predictions aren’t always to be trusted (especially considering some of these were made a couple of years ago), but we decided to include them anyway.
By the year 2020 (not as far away as it sounds),
- 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second, per person.
- Around 1/3 of all data will be processed through the cloud.
The possibilities are endless
If these Big Data facts didn’t leave you feeling full of opportunities, let this final fact do that for you:
- Today, less than 0.5% of available data is actually being analyzed.
For more Big Data lessons, check out our Classroom category.
