Every Minute Online Is a Battle for Consumer Attention

We all know the internet is a big place with a lot going on, but the chart above—put together by media consultants Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan for All Access Music—really points out the sheer amount of activity vying for (or constantly stealing) our attention. (We found it on Digg.)

Pulling public records and claims from major internet companies, the two have for the last three years cobbled together a chart of what happens on average every minute of the day online. The numbers are staggering.

All of the following are happening each minute: 188 million emails and 18.1 million texts sent. 41.6 million messages sent on Facebook and WhatsApp combined. 1.4 million swipes on Tinder.

The sheer amount of video consumed on Netflix (694,444 hours per minute), YouTube (4.5 million videos) and Twitch (1 million views) alone should make traditional entertainment companies despair.

The comparisons go back to 2017, and not much has radically changed, except that numbers keep going up. The comparison chart here showing 2018 versus this year gives a pretty interesting view.

(Click to Enlarge)

Notice first that just about every measure has risen. Facebook is probably more hated than ever, but it still has more people logging in every minute than last year. Google has more searches. Netflix more than doubled the number of hours watched. More apps are downloaded. More money is spent online (from $862,823 per minute up to $996,956 per minute this year; 2020 should crack a million per).

The only numbers that appear to have gone down are Snapchat's, probably because they redesigned, and everyone hated it. Twitter's looks lower, but the social media site switched the metric from tweets sent in 2018 (481,000 per minute) to number of people tweeting (87,500 per minute), so it's not a direct comparison.

There are a few new metrics for 2019: 4.8 million animated GIFs served per minute by Giphy is one, and it shows just how important that outdated image format remains. Adding WhatsApp to the "messages sent" list is another. The number of streaming music subscriptions started is also new for 2019: it's only 41 per minute, but that's going to add up to 21,549,600 new subs for the year.

You can read more at Lewis's column, Merge, on All Access.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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