Data growth may ‘break the web’

An average minute online includes 204 million emails being sent, two million Google searches, €62,548 in Amazon sales, 11,000 professional searches on LinkedIn, 278,000 tweets being posted and 1.8 million people indicating they "like" something on Facebook, according to research from social media consultancy MyCleverAgency and "rewarded search" business Qmee.

"Nothing should surprise you in terms of volume when it comes to the internet and its ability to handle huge amounts of data transactions," Nick Sutton, co-founder and COO with Qmee told The Irish Times.

Other noticeable stats from the research includes the 72 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds, and the 571 new websites cropping up and 15,000 songs downloaded from iTunes every minute.

In addition there are 20 million photo views recorded on Flickr every minute, alongside 104,000 photos shared on Snapchat and 20,000 new images posted to Tumblr. Meanwhile, 3,600 photos are added to Instagram every second.

Francesco D'Orazio, who acts as CIO with Face Labs, a UK-based a social analytics firm, believes though that the Qmee/ MyCleverAgency figures "underestimate" the amount of tweets and Instagram images that find their way online, though Tim Grimes, strategy manager with MyCleverAgency says the numbers came from "reputable" sources.

D'Orazio also said that any similar studies in the future will be redundant unless they also take into account "machine to machine" communication alongside user-focused data. "Whether it's houses, cars, healthcare technology – all the systems that don't involve humans – soon the majority of online traffic is not going to come from humans anymore, it will come from machines talking to each other."

Data left out
The amount of data this will create – alongside massive increases in streaming services across the web – could, he warned, "break the web soon unless alternatives are put in place". Speaking of streaming services, Conor Lynch, founder of Dublin-based SocialMedia.ie was surprised that the "game changing" influence of Netflix wasn't included in the Qmee/MyCleverAgency stats.

Sutton though says that there “isn’t any reason it wasn’t covered”, saying simply “I think if we put any more stats in [the infographic] visually it gets a bit too wacky.”