Some Metrics Regarding the Volume of Online Activity
One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions about just how effective any info control regime can be. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.] As we continue our research, we’ve been attempting to unearth some good metrics / factoids to help tell this story. It’s challenging because there aren’t many consistent data sets depicting online data growth over time and some of the best anecdotes from key digital companies are only released sporadically. Anyway, I’d love to hear from others about good metrics and data sets that we should be examining. In the meantime, here are a few fun facts I’ve unearthed in my research so far. Please let me know if more recent data is available:§ Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.[1]
§ YouTube: every minute, over 35 hours of video are uploaded to the site.[2]
§ eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.[3]
§ Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month)[4]
§ Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days[5] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second)
§ Apple: more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.[6]
§ “Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”[7]
§ Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[8]
[1] Ken Deeter, “Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes,” Facebook.com, February 7, 2011, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=496077348919. Also see:http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[3] eBay, “Who We Are,” http://www.ebayinc.com/who
[4] Matt McGee, “By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz,” SearchEngineLand, February 23, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709
[5] http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/happy-birthday-twitter.html Also see:http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html
[7] Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science, February 10, 2011,http://annenberg.usc.edu/News%20and%20Events/News/110210Hilbert.aspx.
[8] Rex Graham, “Business Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes per Year,” UC San Diego News Center, April 6, 2011, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/04-05BusinessInformation.asp.
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