How much data is created every day in 2024?
Data—the crude oil of modern-day society. Without it, so is your job, your entertainment, and your identity.
Today is all about data, or the digital information stored on the internet. It is the reason you are reading this right now.
With almost all people living on the planet putting pieces of information over the web every second, how much data is created every day in 2024?
Let’s dive right in and find out how this works!
How Much Data is Created Every Day in 2024?
We have come a long way from the hieroglyphics era when people write characters, symbols, and elements on walls thousands of years ago.
Today, binary codes of 0 and 1 rule the world.
In a click, we find all there is to know about a recipe, the steps in building a treehouse, and fixing an old bike.
The invisible hands working behind screens are creating and storing a huge amount of data that can be retrieved on-demand, whenever we like and wherever we are.
3.5 quintillion bytes is how much data is created every day. If you never heard the word ‘quintillion’ before, you are not alone.
As per my Google inquiry, it means a billion of a billion or a million trillion.
In mathematical language, it means 1 with 18 zeroes.
An average person creates 1.7 MB of data every second.
Imagine, there are 5 billion people on the internet today.
Do the math and you will know that there is a lot of data created daily!
The total size of data held by the big four members of the Nasdaq namely Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook alone is already 1.2 million terabytes of data.
What is Data?
In digital parlance, data is information that is digitally stored on computers.
They are encoded in the form of a binary pattern, a computer language using numbers “1” and “0” that is undecipherable to the common human understanding.
This way, it is easier for the computer to process, store, and move information, including showing it on demand.
To consume data, one needs to be connected to the internet. In doing so, we need to pay for WiFi or mobile internet to get information.
This means data is not free—it comes with a cost, and depending on the type of activity we do on the internet, we pay a hefty sum for it.
Data and Memory Size
Before anything else, it is important to familiarize ourselves with “byte” terms or units of memory storage that come with every data consumption.
A bit is the basic unit of digital memory. For information to make sense, these units of memory are suspended together and clustered into a group.
The larger the information, the higher the number of units must come to decipher it together.
Take a look at the Units of Memory available today:
- Byte
- KB or Kilo Byte
- MB or Mega Byte
- GB or Giga Byte
- TB or Tera Byte – the highest memory unit available for regular users)
- PB or Peta Byte
- EB or Exa Byte
- Zetta Byte
- Yotta Byte
- Brono Byte – a new term created to accommodate the ever-expanding memory unit capacity
Commonly, memory capacity for regular data consumers only comes up to a terabyte.
This is the maximum amount of storage available even on the most-advanced applications such as Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams.
On the other hand, big data analytics require much more than this. Big data starts at a petabyte (PB) and goes all the way to the top.
Today, the newly-invented term ‘bronobyte’ is the biggest form of a memory unit.
How Much Data Do We Consume?
Credits: unsplash.com
Now that we know the units of memory used on data, it is time to make use of our knowledge.
I have mentioned that we consume different amounts of data for different activities we do on the web.
Here is a list of digital activities and the amount of data consumption that comes with each.
- Two hours of online streaming on a high-definition movie – 4.2 GB
- An hour of Netflix – 644 MB
- An hour of video streaming on YouTube – 429 MB
- An hour of online gaming – 43 MB
- Listening to an album with 10 tracks on a music streaming platform like Spotify or iTunes – 80 MB
- Downloading a photo from sites like Shutterstock – 5 MB
Some of our internet plans are unlimited while others are capped to a certain amount of data consumption.
How Much Data Do Apps Generate Every Minute?
We have discussed how much data is created every day in 2022, it is time that we find out how much is generated from us by internet applications every minute.
- Messages sent on WhatsApp – 41.6 million messages per minute
- Voice calls and video calls across different applications – 1.3 million calls per minute
- Hours streamed on Netflix – 404,000 hours per minute
- Stories posted on Instagram Stories – 347,000 posts per minute
- Messages exchanged on Facebook Messenger – 150,000 per minute
- Photos posted on Facebook – 147,000 per minute
- Searches on Google’s search engine in 2021 – 2.4 million per minute
- Emails sent every second across different platforms like Gmail – 3 million per second
- Malware sent to attack users – 300,000 every day
That sure is a lot of data to take in! Good thing, computers are created with an unimaginable capacity to decipher, store, and respond to this humongous amount of information.
Data Outlook
Studies show that we will end this year with 97 zettabytes of data worldwide.
This comes as more and more entities go to the comforts of the internet to conduct business and do other productive activities.
This number is expected to grow further and hit 175 zettabytes of data by 2025.
Conclusion
Everything we do on the web, whether simply watching videos or deliberately searching for this article requires data consumption.
Data is in our daily lives, be it in our work, school, social life, and private lives. It is what makes the world go round.
This is why hackers create attacks with the primary purpose of generating data and making sense of what they got later on. So, protect your data at all costs!
3.5 quintillion bytes—that is how much data is created every day in 2024.
Sources
TechJury | Finances Online | Tech Target |
Forbes | Buckeye Broadband | Science Focus |
Seed Scientific | Web Tribunal | |
Geeks for Geeks |