Why Big Data Keeps Getting Bigger

The sun never sets on the creation of new data.

Yes, the rate of generation may slow down at night as people send fewer emails and watch fewer videos. But for every person hitting the hay, there is another person on the opposite side of the world that is turning their smartphone on for the day.

As a result, the scale of data being generated—even when we look at it through a limited lens of one minute at a time—is quite mind-boggling to behold.

The Data Explosion, by Source

Today’s infographic comes to us from Domo, and it shows the amount of new data generated each minute through several different platforms and technologies.

Let’s start by looking at what happens every minute from a broad perspective:

• Americans use 4,416,720 GB of internet data
• There are 188,000,000 emails sent
• There are 18,100,000 texts sent
• There are 390,030 apps downloaded

Now lets look at platform-specific data on a per minute basis:

• Giphy serves up 4,800,000 gifs
• Netflix users stream 694,444 hours of video
• Instagram users post 277,777 stories
• Youtube users watch 4,500,000 videos
• Twitter users send 511,200 tweets
• Skype users make 231,840 calls
• Airbnb books 1,389 reservations
• Uber users take 9,772 rides
• Tinder users swipe 1,400,000 times
• Google conducts 4,497,420 searches
• Twitch users view 1,000,000 videos

Imagine being given the task to build a server infrastructure capable of handling any of the above items. It’s a level of scale that’s hard to comprehend.

Also, imagine how difficult it is to make sense of this swath of data. How does one even process insights from the many billions of Youtube videos watched per day?

Why Big Data is Going to Get Even Bigger

The above statistics are already mind-bending, but consider that the global total of internet users is still growing at roughly a 9% clip. This means the current rate of data creation is still just scratching the surface of its ultimate potential.

In fact, as We Are Social’s recent report on internet usage reveals, a staggering 367 million new internet users were added in between January 2018 and January 2019:

Global internet penetration sits at 57% in 2019, meaning that billions of more people are going to be using the above same services—including many others that don’t even exist yet.

Combine this with more time spent on the internet per user and technologies like 5G, and we are only at the beginning of the big data era.