What Happens In A Minute?

The upcoming long Easter/1May weekend may give for many of us a much needed break from the daily rush of consumption or ever rising internet/smartphone-activities.

Let’s start with consumption. It’s the most important contributor to the GDP in most countries. In the US for instance, consumption makes up 69% of the 17 trillion US-GDP. The other components are investment (17%), government spending (17%), and net exports (-3%).

Consumption numbers are so important that central banks around the world will stop at nothing to ensure they increase. It’s the reason for record-low interest rates and quantitative easing programs. Based on 2014 numbers, here is what is consumed every minute in the US:

• $600,000 in online sales
• $95,000 of online sales on Amazon
• $2,900,000 in credit card purchases
• 233,000 gallons of gasoline
• $150,000 of cigarettes
• $133,000 of lottery tickets
• $28,000 of books
• 340,000 apps downloaded
• $25,000 of video games
• 280,000 cups of coffee
• $115,000 of beer
• 6,000 pizzas and 20,000 hamburgers
• and even $100,000 of baby food

Lottery vs Books. Watching these numbers tabulate in real-time is mesmerizing. They are also concerning…The fact that lottery ticket and cigarette sales tally to 280’000 USD every minute, and book sales are only 28’000 USD really puts things into perspective.

For 2016, we enter into the digital realm to see what happens every minute on the internet around the world.

The infographic originally provided by Excelacom shows how truly important the element of scale is to business today.: Google literally processes 2,4 million searches every minute. In that same span of time, 700’000 people login to Facebook and Amazon sells over 200’000 USD of physical and digital goods.

Platforms such as the ones listed above are comparable in magnitude to other mega-sized companies, but without the intense capital expenditures, debt, or hard costs.

That’s why Alphabet, Google’s parent company, can spend over a billion dollars each year on “moonshots”, and why Facebook’s stock is up 35.6% over the last 52 weeks.

Here are the full stats on what happens every internet minute:

• 701,389 logins on Facebook
• 69,444 hours watched on Netflix
• 150 million emails sent
• 1,389 Uber rides
• 527,760 photos shared on Snapchat
• 51,000 app downloads on Apple’s App Store
• $203,596 in sales on com
• 120+ new Linkedin accounts
• 347,222 tweets on Twitter
• 28,194 new posts to Instagram
• 38,052 hours of music listened to on Spotify
• 04 million vine loops
• 4 million search queries on Google
• 972,222 Tinder swipes
• 78 million video views on Youtube
• 8 million messages on WhatsApp

That’s a lot of data every minute, and this volume of information is part of the reason that these same companies are prioritizing the ability to process and interpret big data more than ever before.

Since ‘theleader.ro’ is less a consumption- or technology-, but more a financial/investment & business website, we also take a look at the internet age from a stock market perspective and thereby find a spectacular growth since electronic trading:

An analysis of the pre vs. post-Internet stock market, published by makes it clear it grew rapidly in the ‘Internet Age’. As we can see in the infographic below, created by the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Online MBA program, the high points of the Dow Jones since the 1950s, we’ll see that things were largely stable until the 80s. After this, the market took off right around the rise of large-scale network connectivity.

The trend has continued every decade since until the present time. Experts say that this is not a coincidence.

The ‘Internet Age’ has reshaped the trading landscape and all players have better access to information than ever before allowing them to make smarter decisions.

They accelerated even more since the introduction of electronic trading in 1992. Uncertainty about the platform soon turned into celebration as the market grew at a rapid pace. In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average doubled within 5 years – from 5,117 in 1995 to 10,786 in the year 2000. It gained a further 67% by 2014 with 17,823 despite the crippling recession just a few years prior.

The changes aren’t limited to the US, of course. The same phenomenon occurred throughout the globe as all the exchanges eventually upgraded their systems. There are 109 of them in total according to the list of the World federation of Exchanges: 23 in the Americas, 57 in the Europe-Middle East, and 29 in the Asia pacific region.

—-

The Internet Minute: The infographic provided by Excelacom shows how truly important the element of scale is to business today: Google literally processes 2,4 million searches every minute. In that same span of time, 700’000 people login to Facebook and Amazon sells over 200’000 USD of physical and digital goods.