How Our Data Consumption Has Changed: 2013-2017
For the past five years, data analyst software company Domo has kept its thumb on the pulse of internet usage. Their research has revealed some interesting trends and changes that have accompanied the dramatic growth in internet usage.
There’s no doubt people are spending a lot of time on the internet. The things we do on the internet generate data. Clicks, taps, swipes, likes, and shares are all recorded—digital footprints left behind us in the electronic ether. The canny and savvy are collecting that data, studying it, and using it to make decisions. Starting back in 2013, Domo began releasing yearly “Data Never Sleeps” infographics: snapshots of data being generated every minute on the internet that illustrate just how useful this data can be.
Comparing the data from these infographics year-to-year reveals the shocking amount of growth the internet is experiencing, and where people are spending their time online. Let’s take a look at some of the information, and how it’s changed over the years.
Back in 2000, there were only 400 million people online. While that may sound like a lot at first, it’s only a fraction of the world’s population. More recent years have seen populations a full order of magnitude larger. 2012, when Domo first started putting this data together, saw an online population of 2.5 billion. That’s almost the combined population of India and China (which, for the record, is a lot of people). It didn’t stop there, though. In 2017, that number rose to 3.7 billion, which is more than half the number of humans on the planet, and that’s not even adjusting for the population of babies and technophobic older people.
Social media has been rapidly expanding in recent years, with platforms quickly ballooning with rising numbers of users and increased usage. Facebook, that cornerstone of electronic social infrastructure, was only sharing 684,478 pieces of content a minute back in 2013. The very next year, that number shot up to 2,460,000. At least half of those were over-politicized nonsense.
