How Much Data is Created and Used Every Day?

Short answer: a lot. And Big Tech is collecting more of it all day, every day. Those 3.5 million emails per second feel really real (especially when you’re coming back from a week off). But to take a deeper look at all these bytes and bits flowing, we broke down some fascinating numbers to help you keep count:

Every day, we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data By 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created daily around the globe (An exabyte = one billion gigabytes) 81% of adults in the U.S. go online daily, including about 31% who say they are online almost constantly In 2021, 54.4% of all internet traffic worldwide was on mobile phones — in 2009, it was 0.7%.

Wow! And, we expect that mobile phones will continue to grow as the main way people access the internet. Just think: do you usually look something up or make a purchase on your phone, or do you tend to wait until you’re near a laptop, tablet, or desktop?

The average smartphone owner uses about 11 GB of mobile data monthly Average SMS text message is 0.0001335 MB of data In 2021, mobile phone consumers in the USA used an average of 46 apps each month

Phones sure have come a long way since the days of just being used to call and text. Did any of your favorite apps make the cut for the top 20 most popular mobile apps?

6 most common ways data is used on smartphones Browsing the internet Apps Email Social media Games Streaming video or audio

If you’re on a limited data plan, you might be worried about how much data you’re using to power those streaming apps. We’ve got 8 simple tips for using less data on your phone. You can thank us later.

Hourly data usage estimates Google Maps ~5 MB per hour Web browsing ~60 MB per hour Facebook ~80 MB per hour Listening to podcasts ~60 MB per hour Playing Fortnite Mobile ~100 MB per hour Watching YouTube ~300 MB per hour

Then again, if you are trying to cut back on your data usage, here’s what you can expect from some of the most popular apps and activities. Now let’s look at how we use the internet overall, not just on our phones.

There are 3.8 million Google searches per minute on average across the globe. Google processes more than 20 petabytes of data every day from those search queries In 2021, about 319.6 billion emails were sent and received daily around the world (that’s about 3.5 million emails per second!) In 2020, users sent around 500,000 Tweets per day

Google is definitely a big gateway to the web. Between maps, shopping, news, images, and just plain web search, it seems like there’s no area they don’t touch. Google even contributes to all those emails being sent through Gmail!

Facebook generated four petabytes of data every day in 2020 (A petabyte = one million gigabytes). That comes from the amount of time users spend on Facebook Netflix had 2.2 million minutes of content available in 2020 During the 2021-22 TV season, the streamer sucked up 1.33 trillion minutes of viewing time. The next closest service, Prime Video, comes in at 173.7 billion minutes of viewing time

We love binging Netflix as much as the next person, but 2.2 million minutes is more than 36,000 hours. In other words, that’s more than four years of content! That even makes watching every season of Grey’s Anatomy sound like a breeze.

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