One thing can be stated with certainty, the Internet is very huge. For obvious reasons it is very difficult to calculate or even estimate its size. In 2010, Twitter users were sending 65 million messages a day. Today, that number has grown to 1.6 billion (so it has expanded almost 25 times!). In 2014 alone, 300 hours of videos were uploaded to Youtube every minute. More than 3 million emails are sent every second and 40,000 queries are typed into Google’s browser. As you can see, the internet is constantly growing and doing so at an ever-increasing speed. Read the article to the end and find out just how big the internet is.
Internet users
The average internet user spends about 6 hours and 45 minutes online each day. In 2023, it is estimated that 5.3 billion people will have access to the internet, or almost 70% of the entire earth’s population. And the number of connected devices is expected to be three times greater than the number of people on earth. The increase in availability and number of devices connected to the network will translate into websites created and content placed in them. As of January 2021, there are over 1.8 billion websites on the Internet. In addition to the “standard” Internet, there is such a thing as the Dark Web, or the so-called hidden web. It hosts content that is inaccessible to standard search engines. It’s hard to estimate how many sites might be on the hidden web. And, as a result, it’s impossible to make a rough estimate of all the websites that exist.
How big is the internet? – How much space does the internet take up?
According to researchers, the Internet takes up more than 10 jottabytes, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (10 quadrillion bytes) of server space. Assuming that one 8TB hard drive is 10×15 cm, we would need more than 1 trillion disks to pack all the data from the Internet. Stacked next to each other they would cover the area of over 2.3 million football fields. As you can see, the Internet, although physically intangible, is a huge place which can never be fully exploited by an average person.
