43 Reminders That The Internet Is Way Bigger Than You Can Even Imagine
1,292,502,456 hours of League of Legends online, 40 million online daters, terabytes of porn, and 2.2 billion emails. What have you accomplished in the last 21 years?
...but the internet is actually huge. Enormous, in fact. GARGANTUAN.
...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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
