90 percent of the data in the world was generated in the last two years alone

The amount of data that is produced every day is truly mind-boggling. At the current pace, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day, and that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.

With so much information at our fingertips, a whole lot of data stockpile keeps adding every time we turn to our search engines for answers -

* We conduct more than half of our web searches from a mobile phone now.

* More than 3.7 billion humans use the internet (7.5 percent increase in growth rate over 2016).

* On average, Google now processes more than 40,000 searches EVERY second (3.5 billion searches per day)!

* While 77% of searches are conducted on Google, it would be remiss not to remember other search engines are also contributing to our daily data generation. Worldwide there are 5 billion searches a day.

Social Media

According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 5.0 report, these are numbers generated every minute of the day -

* Snapchat users share 527,760 photos

* More than 120 professionals join LinkedIn

* Users watch 4,146,600 YouTube videos

* 456,000 tweets are sent on Twitter

* Instagram users post 46,740 photos

Facebook is still the largest social media platform with 2 billion active users, which means more than a quarter of the world’s 7 billion humans are active on Facebook. To add to the Facebook statistics -

* 1.5 billion people are active on Facebook daily

* Europe has more than 307 million people on Facebook

* There are five new Facebook profiles created every second!

* More than 300 million photos get uploaded per day

* Every minute there are 510,000 comments posted and 293,000 statuses updated

Instagram (also owned by Facebook) has also shown impressive growth –

* There are 600 million Instagrammers; 400 million who are active every day

* Each day 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram

* 100 million people use Instagram “stories” feature daily

Communication

Some incredible stats for the volume of communication we send out every minute -

* We send 16 million text messages

* There are 990,000 Tinder swipes

* 156 million emails are sent; worldwide it is expected that there will be 2.9 billion email users by 2019

* 15,000 GIFs are sent via Facebook messenger

* Every minute there are 103,447,520 spam emails sent

* There are 154,200 calls on Skype

Digital Photos

The digital photo numbers continue to grow -

* People will take 1.2 trillion photos by the end of 2017

* There will be 4.7 trillion photos stored

Services

There are some really interesting statistics coming out of businesses and service providers in our new platform-driven economy. Here are just a few numbers that are generated every minute that piqued my interest -

* The Weather Channel receives 18,055,556 forecast requests

* Venmo processes $51,892 peer-to-peer transactions

* Spotify adds 13 new songs

* Uber riders take 45,788 trips!

* There are 600 new page edits to Wikipedia

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things, connected “smart” devices that interact with each other and us while collecting all kinds of data, is exploding (from 2 billion devices in 2006 to a projected 200 billion by 2020) and is one of the primary drivers for our data vaults exploding as well -

* There are 33 million voice-first devices in circulation

* 8 million people use voice control each month

* Voice search queries in Google for 2016 were up 35 times over 2008