The internet is widely considered one of the most important inventions of our time. It is amazing to consider the internet is about four decades old, but we rely on it for everything from entertainment and work to social connections and shopping. Many people live their lives online, with a connection to everything in the palm of their hands through their smartphones. This use has led to an interesting relationship with the internet, and this is what we will be exploring below.
Internet Users
According to recent statistics, there are about 5.07 billion daily internet users globally. This translates to about 64% of the global population using the internet in various ways. This number has been growing, especially when you consider that the number of internet users increased by more than 170 million users in the 12 months preceding October 2022.
There are less than 3 billion people who are not connected to the internet, with these users primarily located in Africa, and Southern and Eastern Asia. This means there is some way to go to ensure universal internet access for everyone. There are numerous reasons why these people remain “unconnected”, with the internet access and the quality of this access being the main factors.
With so many people connected to the internet, what do they do on the internet every minute of the day?
Social Media
Internet users now spend an average of 147 minutes on social media every day. The amount of data generated on social media depends on the social media platform itself and the type of content posted or consumed. Twitter users, for example, post 575,000 tweets every minute, with Instagram users sharing more than 65,000 photos in the same timeframe.
Facebook's users share 240,000 photos and watch over 44 million live streams every second. YouTube's users, on the other hand, consume nearly 700,000 hours of content every minute with Snapchat users sending more than two million Snapchats every minute.
What makes these statistics interesting is that, apart from the shares, all other types of content are unique. This means there is a lot of manpower, effort and time being put into creating unique content for consumption on social media.
Search Engine Searches
Google remains the biggest search engine in the world, with Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and Baidu following in that order. Because it enjoys over 80% market share, statistics for global search engine research typically focus on Google. According to the statistics on Melita.com, people perform over 5.7 million searches on Google every minute. This is an increase of about 63% since 2017 when they performed about 3.5 million searches every minute.
The number of searches will continue to rise, especially as the number of people who conduct these searches on their mobile devices continues to rise. According to Melita.com, the number of smartphone subscriptions stands at about 6.3 billion in the world, a 24% increase since 2017. iPhones are enjoying great growth as the number of iPhones sold has increased by more than 10% since 2017.
With a bigger combined market share than iPhone, we can approximate the number of searches done on Android phones to be about six times as many (450 million iPhone devices Vs 2.5 billion Android devices).
Emails Sent
Email continues to be a very important communication medium and is especially important for B2B communications and marketing. As more people have shifted online and turned to remote work, the number of emails sent has increased. Globally, we now send about 220 million emails every minute. This is about 330 billion emails sent every day.
The average person has 1.75 email addresses, and 1.8 billion out of the 5.59 billion currently active email addresses are Gmail addresses. Another interesting fact to note is that Tuesday is regarded as the best day to send an email if you would like a quick response or even any response at all.
Online Shopping
It is not surprising to realise that the number of people shopping online has increased in the past few years. The pandemic forced a lot of people indoors which led to an increase in the number of people shopping online. Many people did not change their preferences, and this is why so many people continue shopping online.
These increases have led to the revenues of e-commerce giants increasing. For example, Amazon shoppers now spend about 240,000 GBP every minute on the platform. Instacart's users, on the other hand, spend about 56,500 GBP every minute.
We can expect to see these numbers increase as the number of online shoppers as well as the number of platforms they shop on continue to rise.
Big Tech Revenue
E-commerce giants are not the only businesses making a lot of money every minute of the day. The amount of time and money we spend online has led to massive revenues for these companies. Companies like Facebook make over 250,000 GBP every minute, with their ad business driving most of this revenue. Other companies like Netflix and Tesla also generate a lot of revenue, which becomes apparent when you consider how popular these companies are.
Our relationship with the internet continues to evolve, especially as we spend more time on it and continue to rely on it. It is astonishing to see the amount of data that we create and consume every minute on the internet, but these figures are perhaps not surprising considering how much we use it.
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