The internet has revolutionized the way people exchange information, and as technology evolves, the amount of info and the speed with which it's generated is accelerating astronomically. In the business world, this creates both opportunities and challenges. With so much information available, it’s easier than ever to find out what’s happening in your industry space.

At the same time, sorting, organizing, and distributing massive amounts of data can be a big job for even the most tech-savvy companies, if they lack the right tools. Here are some statistics that outline how much data is out there on the web, waiting to be analyzed, and how fast that data pile is growing:

• Data by the day: There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created on the web each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating.[1] Experts calculate that by the year 2020, there will be 1.7MB of data created every second of every day, for every person on earth.[2]
• Google: Google had over 130 trillion pages indexed when it last released its indexing statistics in 2016. That’s up from just 30 trillion in 2013, so the number today, in 2019, is presumably much higher.
• YouTube: Each minute, over 300 hours of new video content is uploaded to YouTube.[3] As of 2019, YouTube is the second most visited site on the web, after Google.
• Facebook: The web’s third most popular site, Facebook generates around 4 petabytes of new content per day.[4] That equates to roughly 317,000 status updates and 147,000 photo uploads per minute.[5]
• Twitter: On an average day, over 500 million new Tweets are published.[6] Many of those are business-related, as Twitter has become the second most popular site for business social media, behind Facebook.
• Blogs: Some say that blogs are dying, but in March of 2019 alone, over 4.4 million blog posts were published every day.[7]
• News: Mainstream news outlets publish anywhere from 100-350 unique pieces of content daily, with some outlets, like Buzzfeed, putting out thousands of articles, videos, on an average weekday. This can easily create a massive backlog for anyone trying to keep track of everything.[8]