There is a lot of data on the internet—and the data is growing. Here are a few facts I’ve collected:

  • Facebook has, on average, 890 million active users per day (source).
  • On average, there are 70 million photos posted to Instagram per day (source).
  • There are more than 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute (source).
  • There are 500 million new tweets per day on Twitter (source).
  • In 2014, there were an average of 1.83 million public photos uploaded to Flickr every day (source).
  • As of May 2014, Pinterest had 30 billion pins (source).
  • In February 2015, Wordpress.com had 61.6 million new posts (that’s roughly 25 posts per second) and 6.7 million new pages (source). This doesn’t count sites running Wordpress CMS which are hosted by other services. And by one estimate, there are just as many of those sites as those which are hosted by Wordpress.com (source).
  • The numbers for Wordpress.com don’t include any of the sites running Wordpress.org’s CMS while being hosted by other services. Wordpress powered sites not hosted by Wordpress.com
  • Back in 2008, Google announced that it had processed 1 trillion unique URLs—and that was 7 years ago (source).
  • According to websitemagazine.com, Google had indexed 200 terabytes of data as of 2014 (source).
  • In February 2015, Netcraft.com registered more than 883 million different websites (source).
  • And, in case you were wondering, reports that the internet is mostly porn have been greatly exaggerated (source).
  • Here is a nice little infographic summing up the per minute data generation as of 2012 for a variety of websites (source).

This volume of data generates a host of interesting questions for the philosopher. I plan to reflect on a few of these issues in future posts, so stay tuned!

(Edited to add Wordpress data.)