How Much Data Is Created on the Internet Each Day?

We've been tracking the growth of data created on the internet for several years, and have updated the information for 2017 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 2017

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 — making a total of 3.8 billion internet users in 2017. This is a 42% increase in people using the internet in just three 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 social media gains 840 new users each minute.
• Since 2013, the number of tweets each minute has increased 58% to more than 455,000 tweets per minute in 2017!
• YouTube usage more than tripled from 2014-2016 with users uploading 400 hours of new video each minute of every day! Now, in 2017, users are watching 4,146,600 videos every minute.
• Instagram users upload 46,740 million posts every minute!
• 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.
• Facebook users also click the like button on more than four million posts every minute!
• 3,607,080 Google searches are conducted worldwide each minute of every day.
• Worldwide, 15,220,700 texts are sent every minute!
• Instagram users post 46,740 pictures every minute.

If we do some quick calculations, we can see the amount of data created on the internet each day. There are 1,440 minutes per day... so that means that there are approximately:

• 1,209,600 new data-producing social media users each day.
• 656 million tweets per day!
• More than four 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 two 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 1.32 billion daily active users on average as of June 2017.
• 4.3 billion Facebook messages posted daily!
• 5.75 billion Facebook likes every day.
• 22 billion texts sent every day.
• 5.2 billion daily Google Searches in 2017.

Email Use Continues to Rise

Don't think that with these increases in social media, email is going away anytime soon! Email use continues to grow. The Email Statistics Report 2017-2021 by the Radicati Group confirms this. 269 billion emails are sent daily in 2017, and this is expected to grow by 4.4% yearly to 319.6 billion in 2021.

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 3.394 billion mobile internet users. This means that in 2017, there are more mobile internet users than desktop internet users, with mobile being used to access 51.4% of web pages and desktop to access 43.4% (tablet is used for 4.9% and other devices for the remaining).
• Approximately 21.9 billion text messages are sent each day in 2017, compared to 18.7 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 also smart TVs, cars, airplanes, you name it — IoT is producing an increasing amount of data.

• IDC forecasts a 31 percent growth in wearable devices from 2016-2020. There were 28.3 million wearable devices sold in 2016, which would mean 82.5 million in 2020.
• 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 six years of transportation data to cities to help them plan public transit.
• Business Insider predicts that by 2020 75% 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.
• By the end of 2016, Uber had 40 million monthly active users.
• Venmo processes $74.7 million in transactions every day.