The amount of data we produce every day is truly mind-boggling. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated. This is worth re-reading! While it’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around these numbers, I gathered together some of my favorite stats to help illustrate some of the ways we create these colossal amounts of data every single day.

Internet

With so much information at our fingertips, we’re adding to the data stockpile every time we turn to our search engines for answers.

• We conduct more than half of our web searches from a mobile phone now.
• More than 7 billion humans use the internet (that’s a growth rate of 7.5 percent over 2016).
• On average, Google now processes more than 40,000 searches EVERY second (3.5 billion searches per day)!
• While 77% of searches are conducted on Google, it would be remiss not to remember other search engines are also contributing to our daily data generation. Worldwide there are 5 billion searches a day.

Social Media

Our current love affair with social media certainly fuels data creation. According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 5.0 report, these are numbers generated every minute of the day:

• Snapchat users share 527,760 photos
• More than 120 professionals join LinkedIn
• Users watch 4,146,600 YouTube videos
• 456,000 tweets are sent on Twitter
• Instagram users post 46,740 photos

With 2 billion active users Facebook is still the largest social media platform. Let that sink in a moment—more than a quarter of the world’s 7 billion humans are active on Facebook! Here are some more intriguing Facebook statistics:

• 32 billion people are active on Facebook daily
• Europe has more than 307 million people on Facebook
• There are five new Facebook profiles created every second!
• More than 300 million photos get uploaded per day
• Every minute there are 510,000 comments posted and 293,000 statuses updated

Even though Facebook is the largest social network, Instagram (also owned by Facebook) has shown impressive growth. Here’s how this photo-sharing platform is adding to our data deluge:

• There are 600 million Instagrammers; 400 million who are active every day
• Each day 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram
• 100 million people use the Instagram “stories” feature daily

Communication

We leave a data trail when we use our favorite communication methods today from sending texts to emails. Here are some incredible stats for the volume of communication we send out every minute:

• We send 16 million text messages
• There are 990,000 Tinder swipes
• 156 million emails are sent; worldwide it is expected that there will be 9 billion email users by 2019
• 15,000 GIFs are sent via Facebook messenger
• Every minute there are 103,447,520 spam emails sent
• There are 154,200 calls on Skype

Digital Photos

Now that our smartphones are exemplary cameras as well, everyone is a photog and the trillions of photos stored is the proof. Since there are no signs of this slowing down, expect these digital photo numbers to continue to grow:

• People will take 1.2 trillion photos by the end of 2017
• There will be 4.7 trillion photos stored

Services

There are some really interesting statistics coming out of businesses and service providers in our new platform-driven economy. Here are just a few numbers that are generated every minute that piqued my interest:

• The Weather Channel receives 18,055,556 forecast requests
• Venmo processes $51,892 peer-to-peer transactions
• Spotify adds 13 new songs
• Uber riders take 45,788 trips!
• There are 600 new page edits to Wikipedia

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things, connected “smart” devices that interact with each other and us while collecting all kinds of data, is exploding (from 2 billion devices in 2006 to a projected 200 billion by 2020) and is one of the primary drivers for our data vaults exploding as well.

Let’s take a look at just some of the stats and predictions for just one type of device, voice search:

• There are 33 million voice-first devices in circulation
• 8 million people use voice control each month
• Voice search queries in Google for 2016 were up 35 times over 2008

Now that you are armed with these numbers, consider all the ways that you generate data as you go about your day. Once you are aware of all the data you create as a single individual, you can start to imagine just how much data we collectively generate every single day. What’s more, these already mind-blowing stats are growing at an ever-increasing rate as more of our world becomes digitized and ‘datafied’.