We surely see a lot of hype surrounding big data but I believe the following 25 facts speak for themselves and help to paint a realistic picture of the phenomenon we now call ‘Big Data’ – a phenomenon that is changing the world as we know it.
- Every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time until 2003 [Source]
- Over 90% of all the data in the world was created in the past 2 years. [Source]
- Writing in 2014, analysts expected the amount of digital information in existence to grow from 3.2 Analytics in 2026″>zettabytes to 40 zettabytes by 2020. [Source]
- The total amount of data being captured and stored by industry doubles every 1.2 years [Source]
- Every minute we send 204 million emails, generate 1,8 million Facebook likes, send 278 thousand Tweets, and up-load 200 thousand photos to Facebook []
- Google alone processes on average over 40 thousand search queries per second, making it over 3.5 billion in a single day. [Source]
- In 2014, around 100 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute — enough that watching a single day of uploads would take about 15 years. The rate has multiplied since. [Source]
- Facebook users share 30 billion pieces of content between them every day. []
- If you burned all of the data created in just one day onto DVDs, you could stack them on top of each other and reach the moon – twice. []
- AT&T is thought to hold the world’s largest volume of data in one unique database – its phone records database is 312 terabytes in size, and contains almost 2 trillion rows. []
- 570 new websites spring into existence every minute of every day. [Source]
- A 2013 forecast put 1.9 million new US IT jobs by 2015 to carry out big data projects. Each of those will be supported by 3 new jobs created outside of IT – meaning a total of 6 million new jobs thanks to big data. []
- Today’s data centres occupy an area of land equal in size to almost 6,000 football fields. []
- Between them, companies monitoring Twitter to measure “sentiment” analyze 12 terabytes of tweets every day. [Source]
- The amount of data transferred over mobile networks increased by 81% to 1.5 exabytes (1.5 billion gigabytes) per month between 2012 and 2014. Video accounts for 53% of that total. [Source]
- The NSA is thought to analyze 1.6% of all global internet traffic – around 30 petabytes (30 million gigabytes) every day [Source]
- In 2014, Allied Market Research forecast the Hadoop market growing from $2 billion in 2013 to $50 billion by 2020. It is one of the clearer misses in this list: the industry moved to cloud object storage and managed query engines instead, and Hadoop faded from new deployments. []
- The number of Bits of information stored in the digital universe is thought to have exceeded the number of stars in the physical universe in 2007. []
- Most of that data now comes from people carrying a sensor platform in their pocket. Our World in Data puts internet use at 63% of the world’s population in 2023, drawing on ITU figures — up from roughly 1.2 billion smartphones in use when this article first ran in 2014. [Source]
- There were 21.1 billion connected IoT devices in 2025, according to IoT Analytics, which forecasts 39 billion by 2030. That is worth setting against the industry’s best-known prediction: 50 billion devices by 2020, which never happened. IoT Analytics notes the market “never lived up to early expectations”, and the 50 billion figure is now cited mainly as a caution about how confidently such forecasts get repeated. []
- Some 12 million RFID tags, used to track objects in the physical world, had been sold by 2011. A forecast at the time projected 209 billion by 2021. []
- Big data has been used to predict crimes before they happen – a “predictive policing” trial in California was able to identify areas where crime will occur three times more accurately than existing methods of forecasting. [Source]
- By better integrating big data analytics into healthcare, the industry could save $300bn a year, according to a recent report – that’s the equivalent of reducing the healthcare costs of every man, woman and child by $1,000 a year. []
- Retailers could increase their profit margins by more than 60% through the full exploitation of big data analytics. []
- The big data industry was valued at about US$10.2 billion in 2013, with forecasts at the time putting it near US$54.3 billion by 2017. [Source]
I hope you found these facts interesting, inspiring and maybe a little scary? As always, please let me know your views on the topic.
Frequently asked questions about data facts
What are some interesting facts about data?
The most useful facts about data are structural rather than numerical, beginning with the fact that most of what organisations hold is unstructured content such as documents, images, audio, video and log files rather than tidy database rows. A second is that data created and data stored are very different quantities: a great deal of what gets generated is transient telemetry that is never written to permanent storage. A third is that much of what is stored is never queried again, the phenomenon usually called dark data. None of these facts expire, which is why they beat any headline volume figure.
How much data is created every day?
Nobody knows, and any daily figure you see quoted is an estimate derived from an annual analyst model rather than a measurement. The most commonly cited source is IDC’s Global DataSphere, which reports annual totals in zettabytes and then gets divided by 365 by whoever needs a punchier number. The estimates vary enormously because the underlying definitions do. Some count data created, captured and replicated together, so one video watched by many people counts many times. Others count only what is retained. Before you cite a number, check which of those it measures.
Is it true that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years?
The claim is unfalsifiable as usually stated, and it has been recycled almost word for word since around 2013, which should tell you how little it means. It originated in vendor marketing and gets reprinted every year without anyone recalculating it, so the version you read today is not describing today. The deeper problem is that the statement is close to a mathematical property of any steeply rising curve: if volumes keep compounding, the most recent window will always dominate the cumulative total. That makes it a description of exponential growth rather than a finding about data.
How much data does one person generate?
There is no credible universal figure, because the answer changes by an order of magnitude depending on whether you count what a person actively creates or everything generated about them. Active creation covers messages, photographs, documents and uploads. Passive generation covers location pings, ad impressions, transaction records, sensor readings and telemetry from connected devices, and that category dwarfs the first for most people. Per-person averages also flatten real differences between a heavy streaming household and someone barely online. If you need a number, measure your own users rather than borrowing a global average.
What is a zettabyte?
A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, or 10 to the power of 21 bytes in decimal notation. The sequence runs kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte and then yottabyte, with each step multiplying by a thousand. One zettabyte is also a billion terabytes or a thousand exabytes. Be aware that storage vendors use these decimal definitions while many operating systems report binary units, so the strictly correct binary equivalent is the zebibyte at 2 to the power of 70 bytes. That gap is why a new drive always shows less capacity than the label promised.
