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.

So we’ve got quantity – but what about quality?

To accompany these big data facts, we also think it’s important to highlight that it’s not all about quantity. Here are some figures and trends exploring the current state of data quality across the globe.

Did you know that the average organization is losing $13.5 million per year as a result of poor Data Quality? (Gartner, 2015) On top of this, 25% of companies in the U.S. do not trust that their data is accurate (Experian, 2013) and, from a more role-specific perspective, 84% of CEOs worry about the quality of the data within their organizations. (KPMG, 2016)

As if this wasn’t enough to highlight the problem, a study by Deloitte (2014) showed that companies believe that barriers to using data effectively are most commonly related to a lack of quality (67% of the time). To break this down further, this means that if organizations managed to hone in on an increased level of quality, 67% of their issues when it comes to using data effectively would be solved.

However, at the moment, there is a shockingly low adoption rate when it comes to integrating strategies to promote and ensure high-quality data. As is depicted further through the pie-chart above, only 18% of organizations around the world have an optimized strategy in place with a dire 17% of companies currently operating without one in place. (Experian, 2017)

If you want to find out more, head over to “How much is poor Data Quality costing you?”.

If you are new to NodeGraph, first of all – welcome. We are a data quality platform for QlikView and Qlik Sense. To find out how we can help you take control of your data, get started today.