PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

What Happens in 60 Seconds on the Internet?

In a single minute, 6.3 million Google searches are entered, and 241 million email messages are sent—and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

Our Expert
LOOK INSIDE PC LABS HOW WE TEST
65 EXPERTS
43 YEARS
41,500+ REVIEWS
(Credit: Domo)

The 11th Edition of Data Never Sleeps, the annual infographic depicting what happens every minute online, is here.

Compiled yearly since 2013 by the data experts at Domo, the latest iteration continues to add new bits of data, while others fall off the list. PCMag spoke to Domo’s SVP of Product, Ben Schein and he says every year they make a judgment call about what data is available, but also “what’s popular, what’s going on in the culture.” All while keeping the self-control to limit things to one pie chart. As an example, he notes that this year, time spent on Zoom-based meetings is not on the graphic, like it was throughout the pandemic.

What they did add for 2023 is how often Taylor Swift gets a stream (69,400 times per minute). Also new and in keeping with the internet’s collective obsession for the year is an entry on generative artificial intelligence, specifically that ChatGPT gets a total of 6,944 prompts every minute.

Another interesting stat is that people trade $398 million in treasury bonds online every minute. Compare that to the average $455,000 spent on Amazon in the same 60 seconds.

A few stats that continue year to year since 2022 include:

  • Emails sent: 231.4 million per minute sent last year, went to 241 million per minute this year; (back in 2013 the stat was 204 million).
  • Google searches: 5.9 million per minute last year to 6.3 million (2 million per minute in 2013).
  • Tweets: 347,200 per minute last year to 360,000—after a dip between 2021 and 2022 (100,000 in 2013).
  • Venmo cash sent: $437,600 per minute last year to $463,000 (2013 was the year PayPal bought Venmo.)
  • Years of content streamed: 43 years streamed every minute… last year Domo styled it as 1 million hours streamed per minute. One million hours would cover 114 years so streaming time seems to have declined since the pandemic “ended.”

The one vendor Domo has mentioned continuously all 11 times it has issued this graphic is Instagram. It gets two mentions, once for how often people send a Reel via a direct message (694,000 times per minute) but also for how many times people downloaded the Threads app (3,720 times per minute) since it launched in July. The metric used for Instagram has changed, however—in 2017, Domo said Instagram users post 46,740 photos per minute.

Perhaps most interesting of all, using data pulled from Statista, the graphic indicates that the current global population using the internet is 5.2 billion, or 64.6% of the globe. That’s more than double the 2.1 billion with access in 2013.

For more—including stats on DDOS attacks, Doordash orders, and Twitch watchers—read Domo’s easily digestible full report (including a PDF) and check out the full graphic below.

(Credit: Domo)



About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

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.

Read full bio