Sometimes the internet can feel pretty small...
...but the internet is actually huge. Enormous, in fact. GARGANTUAN.
Via internet-map.net
...But just how big? Think of it this way: if one byte was equal in size to the largest bacteria on earth (0.5mm) 1MB would equal about 720 feet. Or the size of the Willis Tower.
Advertisement
Which would mean that 64 gigabytes —roughly the storage size of an iPad — would be about as big as the circumference of the earth.
Pretty crazy, right? And we're just getting started...
Here's one: did you know that AOL still has 3 million paid dial-up subscriptions? That's about the same number of people as live in the city of Chicago.
Via wordpress.com
Advertisement
Or did you know that Candy Crush brings in around $633,000 per day—that's more than $230 million a year
It's estimated that over 66 million people play Candy Crush globally (including 25 million on Facebook). That's more active users than Path, MySpace, Spotify, Evernote, and Pinterest.
It's also larger than the populations of both Thailand and France...
Advertisement
In fact, we love to play games online. Between July 2011 and July 2012 gamers played 1,292,502,456 hours of League of Legends online. That's 147,448 years, if you're keeping score.
We also love photos. Especially the ones we take of ourselves!
For instance, Instagram has uploaded over 16 billion photos since it launched in late 2010.
Advertisement
Flickr — by comparison — has uploaded half that (8+ billion), despite being six years older.
And each day Facebook puts up 300 million user photos, or about seven petabytes of new photo content each month.
Videos are cool too. Every day just on Facebook we watch about 500 hours of YouTube video.
Advertisement
Over 4 billion YouTube videos are viewed every day.
And the average YouTube visitor watches about 338 minutes of video per month
And we sure do like to text and send messages...
Via google.com
Advertisement
There were about twice as many text messages sent in 2012 (2.2 trillion) than there were Google searches (1.2 trillion).
WhatsApp sends nearly 68 times as many messages each day (27 billion) than Twitter sends tweets (400 million ).
Weibo sends roughly 7 times more messages per minute (729,571) than Twitter (100,000).
Advertisement
We also like to use the internet to 'get to know one another'
Out of 54 million single Americans, roughly 40 million have tried online dating.
There are more registered users on eHarmony (20 million) than Twitter's video companion, Vine (13 million). Annual revenue for the online dating industry is projected at $1.049 Billion for 2013.
Advertisement
And of course there's porn. Copious and bountiful porn!
In 2012, YouPorn told Extreme Tech that the site pulls in 100 million page views per day, noting that at peak hours, its sees 4,000 page views and streams nearly 100 gigabytes per second.
The same study estimates that nearly 2% of all internet traffic is porn. Though, nobody knows for certain.
Advertisement
But enough unsavory stuff. Hey, remember email! Well, there are 2.2 billion email users worldwide
And it's estimated we sent 144 billion emails per day in 2012...
And out of all of those billions of communications 61% were were "non-essential" and 68.8% were marked as spam.
Advertisement
We also like to use the internet to deliver food to our lazy, atrophied bodies. And in 2012, delivery services Seamless and GrubHub did a combined $875 million in takeout sales.
Trendy food is popular online, too. In 2012 Seamless users ordered 30,174 kale dishes.
It's a lot to take in, we know...
Advertisement
But we must keep going! Here's one! Did you know that more people use Yahoo Mail monthly (281 million) than Twitter (200 million)?
But they're both dwarfed by WeChat, which now has over 400 million users, despite the fact that you may have never heard of it.
Ok! Time for the lightning round!
Advertisement
Here's some crazy stuff that happens every 60 seconds online:
72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube...
Snapchat sends 140,000 snaps...
Pandora streams 61,141 hours of music...
Advertisement
204 million — yeah, MILLION — emails are sent...
Amazon sells $80,000 worth of stuff every minute. If you're measuring that in books, it comes to about 2,784.55 hardcover fiction books/minute...
Phil Noble / Reuters
A worker collects orders at Amazon's fulfilment centre in Rugeley, central England December 11, 2012.
In all, there's over 639,800 GB of global data transferred every 60 seconds...
Advertisement
...all swirling and churning through the web's 3.85 billion indexed pages...
...and weaving in and out of the internet's 634 million sites
...and reducing you and your "online footprint" to a tiny, insignificant speck...
Advertisement
{{ blurb }}
{{/blurb}} {{#picture_url}}