What Happens in an Internet Minute?

Christmas… The time of year for families. For reflecting on the year that’s ending. For looking forward to a New Year. 

…And, of course – like every other time of year – for checking your phone. Not just being with the family, but taking photos of them all. Sharing the photos. Sending texts and WhatsApp messages. Capturing the baby’s first steps on TikTok… 

We’ll all be using our phones this Christmas and we’ll all be online. So we thought we’d take a look at just what happens in one minute on the internet. The pandemic meant that most people increased the time they spent online – and the numbers are, frankly, astonishing…

95m photos and videos are shared on Instagram every day. That works out to 65,972 per minute with the average user spending 30 minutes per day on Insta.

That’s slightly less than Facebook, where users average 34 minutes per day. In a single Facebook minute, there are 510,000 comments posted, 293,000 statuses updated and 240,000 photos uploaded. 

Twitter has 353m active users, who send 350,000 tweets every minute. Statistics for 2020 show that tweets about cooking increased more than 300% as we all gained weight during lockdown…

Snapchat is one of the preferred apps for Millennials and Generation Z, with marketing experts suggesting it can reach 90% of 13 to 24-year-olds. The platform has 265m active daily users, creating 3bn snaps every day. That scarcely believable number works out to over 2m snaps per minute. 

What about TikTok? The most downloaded app of 2020 has 1bn videos seen every day – around 700,000 per minute. 

A major feature of lockdown was, of course, the time many people spent binge-watching on Netflix. There is 140m hours of content consumed every day on Netflix – so in our internet minute there is very nearly 100,000 hours of content watched.  

The numbers keep on coming: more than one billion hours of YouTube videos are watched every day – so 700,000 hours every minute. We send 2m texts every minute. And, inevitably, we shop. Nearly $5,000 is spent on Amazon every second – working out to very nearly $300,000 (£225,000) every minute. 

It is easy to dismiss these statistics as mere numbers. Or to mutter that people have too much time on their hands. But for our clients running businesses there is an important message. People spend a lot of time on apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok and a lot of that time is spent discussing purchases. Younger TikTok users spend up to 80 minutes a day on the app and 20% of Millennials open apps at least 50 times per day. 

So as owners and directors of SMEs take pictures of their families this Christmas, it might make sense to add a New Year’s resolution as well – to look at some social media apps you may not have previously considered.