You’ve just finished a masterpiece of a composition – recorded multiple takes, run your audio through your esoteric rack gear, mixed it, mastered it, created artwork, even created an accompanying music video. Weeks to months of work. Now the real work begins: getting it heard.
Today, we take a deep dive into the scale of content shared per second on the internet, from audio/visual (Spotify/Soundcloud/Instagram/YouTube) to social media sharing (Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/WhatsApp). The scale of content uploaded is mind-blowing. The battle for attention is brutal and that’s before we even consider the incoming AI generative works that will be produced at a scale incomprehensible to the human brain. We’re already employing AI tools to find creative works that matter to us – Discover Weekly Algorithm-based playlists by Spotify, Youtube’s Recommendation engine, etc. No wonder Apple, Amazon, Google, et al. are bullish on voice technology. “Siri, Play me something I like.”
Click the button above to view the interactive infographic on how much content is uploaded to the internet per second, or read on…
Websites
Currently, there is no absolute number of all existing web pages on the Internet. But, there is an estimate. According to the research project (updated on a daily basis) by Tilburg University, the indexed web contains at least 5.26 billion pages.
For the purpose of working out how many sites are created per day, let’s take the change in total number of indexed websites per minute: approximately 380. This obviously does not factor in the deep web. So it’s no doubt much higher.
380 websites / 60 seconds = 6.3 new websites per second
Sources: worldwidewebsize.com / dekunder.nl / millforbusiness.com
SoundCloud
SoundCloud operates worldwide, enabling users to upload 12 hours of audio material to its platform every minute. Each audio file must be transcoded and stored in multiple formats. The company also logs and analyzes billions of events daily to better understand user behavior and continually optimize its service. It currently stores 2.5 PB of data.
12 hours of music a minute = 720 minutes per minute / 60 seconds / 60 seconds = 12 minutes of audio uploaded per second
Source: aws.amazon.com
Reddit’s 2018 year-in-review revealed that there were 153 million posts, 1.2 billion comments, and 27 billion votes. Reddit is home to thousands of communities, endless conversation. Whether you’re into breaking news, politics, techno music production, or a never-ending stream of internet-famous cats, there’s a community on Reddit for you.
This report was compiled at the end of November 2018, so it doesn’t account for the full year. To get a closer approximation of how many comments per second were uploaded in the full year, I broke down the comments to 109,090,909.091 per month, then multiplied by 12, and divided by 3.154e+7 (seconds in a year): 41 comments per second.
Source: redditblog.com
Spotify
Daniel Ek, CEO of the Spotify, was recently quoted saying, “With more than 50 million tracks now available on Spotify, and growing by close to 40,000 daily, the discover tools we’re building have never been more important to consumers and artists alike.”
40,000 tracks / 86,400 seconds = 46 tracks per second uploaded by artists and labels
Source: musicbusinessworldwide.com
Blogs
According to WordPress statistics, users produce more than 70 million new posts each month. On average that’s 2.75 million posts published each day on WordPress alone. WordPress-driven blogs account for 27% of all posts. This means that there are a total of over 10 million blog posts per day when factoring in other blogging platforms.
10 million posts / 86,400 seconds = 115.7 blog posts per second (rounded to 116 in the infographic)
Source: hostingtribunal.com
YouTube
More than 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. This is the first per-minute upload amount shared by YouTube since VidCon 2015, where CEO Susan Wojcicki revealed that 400 hours were being uploaded every minute.
500 hours is 30,000 minutes of video per min x 1,440 (minutes per day)
43,200,000 / 86,400 seconds = A mind-blowing 500 minutes of video uploaded per second
Source: tubefilter.com
Instagram users share on average more than 95 million photos and videos every day, with posts garnering 4.2 billion “likes” each day.
95 million / 86,400 seconds per day = 1,099 Instagram posts per second
Source: reuters.com
Facebook mentioned in an Internet.org white paper that users are uploading 350 million photos per day, or nearly 2.5 billion photos every week. This is not the most recent stat (2013), so I’m under reporting here – but this number gives you a sense of the scope…and in today’s privacy-minded climate, sharing a more updated figure might not be on the top of their agenda.
350 million / 86,400 seconds per day = 4,050+ photos per second
Sources: internet.org / omnicoreagency.com
With over 500 million Tweets being sent each day, hundreds of millions of people are exploring links, articles, Retweets, Trends, and Moments.
500 Million / 86,400 seconds per day = 5,787 Tweets per second
Source: business.twitter.com
Snapchat
Snapchat users spend 30 minutes per day on average using the app, and generated over 3 billion snaps per day. Yes, 3 billion snaps.
3 billion snaps / 86,400 seconds per day = 34,722 snaps per second
Source: variety.com
Facebook recently revealed at their F8 conference that 450 million users share a story on WhatsApp daily. Additionally, 65 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp every day.
65 billion / 86,400 = 752,314 WhatsApp messages per second
Source: theverge.com
Other interesting stats include – Approx. 2.8 million emails are sent per second (source), Google receives over 63,000 searches per second (source), and at any given moment over 50,000 people are live streaming their video game play on Twitch with a combined audience of approx. 1.5 million people – that’s a bigger viewership than most primetime news channels (source).
How will creative folks make a living from their work when their audience’s attention is diverted in a billion different ways? Perhaps by doing what we’ve done since the dawn of civilization: Band together, make some noise, and – maybe now, harness AI and intelligent virtual assistants to cut through the noise.
