What happens in 60 seconds on the internet?
What happens in 60 seconds on the internet?
Every 60 seconds in Grahamstown, a minute passes.
Tick tock.
Meanwhile, every 60 seconds on the internet, there’s rather a lot that goes on, and we’re mostly completely oblivious to it.
Here’s a quick look at the giddying enormity of all.
In one minute on the internet, 1.35 million gigabytes of data is transferred. If you were to put all of that data onto standard DVDs, you’d need about 287 000 of them.
If you stacked all of those on top of each other (in their cases), you’d have a pile reaching 2.8 kilometres high – that’s more than three times the height of the world’s tallest skyscraper. Yikes.
How many times a day do you update your Facebook status? If you updated it twice a day, every day, for the next 40 years, that’d be a total of 29 200 updates.
That’s how many updates are published every six-or-so seconds by Facebook’s 1.23 billion monthly active users.
On Twitter, 670 new accounts are created every minute, with around 347 000 tweets sent in the same time.
On Facebook, people are clicking or tapping that ubiquitous little thumbs-up Like button 3.2 million times in one minute, and publishing 3.3 million posts.
Over 140 000 hours’ worth of video is watched (and 72 hours uploaded) every minute on YouTube.
It would take you around five years to view all the video content that currently travels over the internet in just one second.
In case you were wondering, there are 11.8 million South Africans active on Facebook each month, and 6.6 million on Twitter, compared to 4.9 million on MXit and 1.2 million on Instagram.
YouTube has leapfrogged Twitter into second place in terms of monthly active users in South Africa, with the monolithic video service now boasting 7.2 million users here – that’s a huge 53% jump since last year.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet other than Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, a dizzying amount of stuff is happening every single minute:
•204 million emails sent (more than 70% is spam)
•4 million searches on Google
•706 000 files saved to DropBox
•416 000 judgemental swipes on Tinder
•347 000 photos shared on WhatsApp
•48 000 apps downloaded by Apple users
•23 000 hours of yakking away on Skype
•3000 items purchased on Amazon
In the minute or so it has taken you to read this column, Apple has made R780 000 profit (not revenue), compared to Microsoft’s R450 000 and Google’s R270 000.
Staggering!
If you’re interested in seeing exactly how quickly data (and money) is generated by some of the internet’s biggest players, check out a site called The Internet in Real-Time at http://pennystocks.la/internet-in-real-time.
It’s a simple dashboard that shows live per-second updates covering searches, uploads, comments, pins, posts, emails, downloads, views, earnings and other crazy stats.
