How Much Data Is Generated Every Day in 2024?

Worldwide data generation continues to soar as people rely increasingly on the internet for their daily information needs. It’s difficult to get your head around the vast volumes of data generated every day, so we’ve done the hard work for you.

In this article, we highlight some of the most striking data statistics in various areas, including internet usage, social media, and communication. 

• The amount of data generated worldwide has soared from 2 ZB in 2010 to a whopping 64.2 ZB in 2020 — which is more than the number of detectable stars in the cosmos. 
• Data creation is predicted to reach 181 ZB by 2025.
• A mere 2% of the data created and consumed in 2020 was saved and stored up to 2021.
• Storage capacity is forecast to increase from a current installed base of 6.7 ZB in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.2% to 2025.
• In 2024, the number of emails is about 361 billion every day.
• 16 million texts are sent — every minute.
• Daily data creation has reached 328.77 million terabytes of data.

General data creation

Before we look at the more specific areas of data creation, let’s review the status of data generation in general.

• Every day, the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.
• 90% of global data was created in just the last two years.
• More than 40% of internet data was generated by machines in 2020.
• By 2025, people will create 463 exabytes of data daily.

Internet usage

Reliance on the internet is the main reason data creation is soaring. In 2010, when internet usage was not as prominent as it is today, worldwide daily data generation stood at just 2 ZB — a tiny fraction of today’s figure. Just look at what’s happening online today:

• More than 7 billion people use the internet.
• The Google search engine alone processes more than 40,000 searches every second (3.5 billion searches per day).
• Internet searches worldwide have reached 5 billion searches a day.
• Google is the top internet search engine, with 77% of searches conducted on it.

Social media

Internet platforms are responsible for a huge proportion of internet usage — 5.04 billion of the 5.35 billion internet users use social media. These platforms create continuous data streams powered by the Internet of Things (IoT), which includes user-generated content, data collection, and storage.

Here’s a quick look at the data created on the main social media platforms — every minute:

• On Snapchat, people share 527,760 photos.
• LinkedIn welcomes more than 120 new members.
• On YouTube, 4,146,600 videos are watched.
• The X platform receives 456,000 tweets.
• People post 46,740 photos on Instagram.

On the Facebook platform alone:

• There are 3.07 billion active users.
• Europe has more than 307 million users.
• Every second, 5 new profiles are set up.
• Users upload in excess of 300 million photos every day.
• Users post 510,000 comments each minute.
• Every minute, 293,000 statuses are updated.

And on the Instagram platform (also part of the Meta family):

• More than 100 million users are active on Instagram Stories daily.
• Instagram subscribers share 95 million photos and videos daily.

Communication

With the internet now the preferred avenue to find and distribute information, it’s hardly surprising that much of the data the world creates is used for communication. Whether it’s via voice, text, or graphics most of us are relying on virtual communications. Just look at what’s happening every minute of the day: 

• 16 million text messages are sent.
• We swipe 990,000 times on Tinder.
• 156 million emails are sent.
• Of those emails, 103.5 million are spam.
• We send 15,000 GIFs via Facebook Messenger.
• 154,200 Skype calls are made.

Digital photos

Whether it’s selfies, pictures of that great dinner, or cute puppy snaps, we’re taking lots of photos. Here’s a snapshot: 

• Roughly 28.08 billion photos were stored online every day during 2023.
• In 2023, approximately 10 trillion photos were stored online via media platforms such as cloud storage.
• Of all social media sites, WhatsApp has the most photos shared by users — 6.9 billion photos shared daily. 

Services

Online transactions cover every area of life you could imagine, but there are some common themes to the services people are interested in. Not surprisingly, the weather is high on the list.

• The Weather Channel receives some 18,055,556 forecast requests each minute.
• The mobile payment service Venmo processes $51,892 worth of peer-to-peer transactions each minute.
• Every minute, Spotify adds 13 new songs.
• People make 45,788 trips on Uber every minute.
• Wikipedia makes 600 new page edits each minute.

Internet of Things (IoT)

A key contributor to the huge volume of data being generated worldwide, IoT has become one of the most important technologies of the 21st century. It connects everyday devices to the internet via embedded devices, sharing and collecting data on an ever-increasing basis.

Here are some of the headline figures associated with IoT data generation:

• The number of connected devices in the world grew 100x between 2006 and 2020 — from 2 billion to 200 billion.
• There are 33 million voice-first devices in use.
• Voice control is used by 8 million people monthly.
• Google voice search queries have increased 35x since 2008.

App usage

So, just where are we spending our time online generating all that data? You probably won’t be surprised to hear that mobile applications are responsible for a huge amount of that usage.

• Mobile app usage increased 24.5% between 2022 and 2023, with users spending nearly 16 billion hours on them.
• In-app purchases were valued at $174.65 billion in 2023.
• This figure is set to more than double by 2032, reaching $387.4 billion.
• The top six brands — Google, Netflix, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft — account for almost 57% of app traffic.

Applications’ share of global traffic:

Leading mobile applications’s share of global traffic:

The leading video apps:

• YouTube accounts for 14.61% of total app traffic.
• Netflix makes up: 9.39% of app traffic.
• Facebook Video is responsible for 4.2%.
• 4% of app traffic is attributable to TikTok.

QUIC protocol usage:

With all that data in circulation, keeping things moving smoothly and safely is a major concern. QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a protocol Google developed to make web connections faster and more reliable. 

• Almost 30% of traffic in EMEA operates on QUIC.
• QUIC is used for 16% of traffic in North America.
• More than 75% of Facebook traffic uses QUIC and HTTP/3.
• According to Meta, QUIC reduced request errors by 6%. 
• Tail latency fell by 20% at Meta, due to QUIC.
• QUIC has also reduced response header size 5% at Meta, relative to HTTP/2.

Global internet bandwidth usage

All of that internet data needs to be transported. Internet bandwidth refers to the amount of information that can be received every second.

• Global internet bandwidth increased by 22% in 2024.
• Total global bandwidth is now 1,479 Tbps, representing a 4-year CAGR of 25%. 
• Although the pace of growth has declined, bandwidth has more than doubled since 2020.

Average household data usage:

How is data consumed in homes around the world? Here’s a snapshot:

• The average household consumes 652 GB of broadband data every month. 
• Among broadband data users, those who use gig speeds increased by 29% 
• Power internet users (they consume in excess of 2 TB or more per month) rose by 37% in 2024.

It only takes a minute…

What can you do in a minute? Watch half a movie trailer? Badly brush your teeth? Here’s what happens in the world of data in 60 seconds:

• 16 million texts sent
• 5.9 million Google searches
• 231.4 million emails sent
• $12,900 in online event bookings
• $90.2 million in crypto purchases
• $437,000 in Venmo purchases
• $443, 000 spent on Amazon
• $76.400 spent on Doordash orders
• 1.1 million hours of streaming viewed
• 500 hours of YouTube videos uploaded
• 184,600 hours spent on Zoom meetings
• 1.7 million pieces of Facebook content shared
• 66,000 Instagram photos shared
• 347,200 tweets on Twitter
• 2.43 million snaps on Snapchat
• 1.1 million Tinder swipes

Global internet population growth

The internet continues to reach more and more people every year. Here is how it has expanded in the past several years:

Now that you’ve seen how data is increasing even as you read this, perhaps you’re wondering just where that data goes. Wonder no more:

1. A 480p YouTube video uses 8.3MB per minute and 500MB per hour.
2. A 480p Twitch video consumes between 0.405GB and 0.54GB per hour.
3. One Snapchat needs 1MB to send.
4. One text message requires a mere 0.0001335 MB of data.
5. It usually costs just one kilobyte of data to share a message on WhatsApp.
6. A VoIP call uses between 0.5MB and 1.3MB per minute.
7. The infrastructure required for the average application generates more than 113GB of log data daily.

Here is a snapshot of where some platforms use that data: 

YouTube data usage:

In general, video content is responsible for 53.72% of internet data traffic.

Netflix data usage:

Spotify data usage:

• A three-minute song takes 2MB. 
• An hour uses 40MB.
• 960MB of date is consumed every day.

All of that data needs storage, processing, and distribution. Data centers are the physical facilities where digital data is stored. They house the computing infrastructure that IT systems need, including servers, data storage drives, and network equipment. By 2025, global cloud storage will reach 200+ zettabytes of data.

In 2006, mathematician Clive Humby said “Data is the new oil.” Like oil, data is valuable, but it needs to be refined to be truly powerful. We’ve seen just how much data is surging through the world right now, and those volumes are likely to continue increasing exponentially year by year. 

To harness the true power of data, it must be analyzed, processed, and refined to create the right kind of constructive insights to drive business value.

Sources

• Facebook Users Statistics (2024) — Worldwide Data
• Breaking Down The Numbers: How Much Data Does The World Create Daily in 2024?
• Sandvine The Global Internet Phenomena Report January 2022
• Domo Data Never Sleeps 10.0
• 53 Important Statistics About How Much Data Is Created Every Day in 2024
• How Much Data is Generated Every Day (2024)
• How Much Data Is Created Every Day in 2024?
• Cumulative number of hours spent using apps worldwide from 2020 to 2023
• In App Purchase Market Research Report Source
• Executive Summary IP Networks Research Service
• Report: Internet users are gobbling data by more than a half-terabyte