Signals never sleep

A letter to the best wedding creators in the world by Josh Withers

Twelve years ago this week I shared this infographic about the data being transferred around the internet:

How have things changed in the last decade?

• ChatGPT (less than two years old today) receives 7,000 prompts every minute
• Google now processes over 6.3 million searches per minute, triple the number
• Even in its currently hobbled/failing state, X (formerly Twitter) sees 360,000 posts per minute
• Instagram users send over 694,000 reels via direct messages every minute, and 69,000 photos
• Spotify users stream 24,000 hours of music every minute
• Streaming video viewers watch over 40 years of streaming content every single minute
• Amazon's sales have skyrocketed to over $455,000 per minute, almost doubling the total ecommerce space
• YouTube users upload over 500 hours of video every minute, up from 48
• Over 204 million emails are sent every minute, maintaining email's status as a primary communication tool, which is how you most likely got here
• Facebook sees 240,000 new photos and 510,000 comments every minute
• Foursquare, Tumblr, and Flickr have paled or faded
• Over 1,500 Wordpress blog posts are posted every minute

The one notable change is with the ever popular Apple App Store dropping from 47,000 app downloads per minute to something closer to 1,000. It's not that people aren't using their phone or apps, it's just so more likely that we have already installed and downloaded all the apps we want to use, and the hill you've got to get someone over to install a new app is ever higher.

My summary: We humans are exchanging and offering more signals about ourselves than we ever have and it's not just on the public record but on digital record and that has never been more exciting and terrifying at the same time.