Data never sleeps: what happens every social minute

Domo’s “Data Never Sleeps 9.0” infographic, its 9th annual look at online consumer behaviour and how we use, generate, and view data every minute across high-traffic platforms and applications, reveals the growing intensity of social media usage during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Covering both social, entertainment and transaction platforms, from Instagram to Instacart and YouTube to Netflix, “Data Never Sleeps” is a glimpse into the sheer volume, velocity and variety of data generated and distributed over the Internet.

2020 upended everything, from how we engage with each other, with brands and with the digital world, and the pandemic transformed how we eat, how we work and how we entertain ourselves. Additionally, the pandemic contributed to a sweeping upward trend in internet usage. From January to July 2021, the number of people that accessed the internet jumped by 10%, with 5.17 billion people, or 65% of the population, logging on.

Data never sleeps, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Domo’s 9th edition of the “Data Never Sleeps” infographic highlights digital trends in our increasingly data-driven world, including:

• The (Home) Office: As the pandemic spread, many offices moved their workforces online—and for many employees, remote work will become the norm rather than the exception. As a result, collaborative office tools have been more necessary than ever before, with Zoom hosting 856 minutes of webinars every minute and 100,694 people connecting on Microsoft Teams, which is up 93% from last year (52,083 in DNS 8.0).
• From the silver screen to the small screen: With movie theaters shuttered, the film industry scrambled to find new ways to create and curate content, and streaming services became king. In the first half of 2021, Netflix’s 117 million subscribers watched 140 million hours of content every day. The average person spent an hour on streaming services every day in 2021—double the time they spent in 2020. On YouTube, livestreams increased by 45%, with users watching 694,444 hours of video each minute.
• Being social, virtually: From virtual birthday parties, to Zoom concerts, being social in this new world order has been safely from behind our screens. People sent 12 million iMessages every minute, and upload nearly 240,000 photos on Facebook, a 63% change year over year (147,000 in DNS 8.0). A relative newcomer to the online social space, Clubhouse, saw more than 208 rooms created every minute, while viral video favorite TikTok had users that watched approximately 167 million clips.
• Virtual transactions that aren’t NFTs: There has been plenty said about cryptocurrency and NFTs, but what about good old-fashioned virtual purchases? With quarantine in place in many areas across the world, online shopping continues to be the preference, with more than 6 million people shopping online in any given minute of the day. Shoppers spend $283,000 on Amazon per minute, while Instacart shoppers spend nearly $67,000. Additionally, peer-to-peer payments increased year-over-year, with Venmo users sending $304,414 per minute (compared to $239,196 in DNS 8.0).

“Over the past year, companies continued to accelerate digital initiatives to empower business agility and the new remote workforce. Our annual Data Never Sleeps report looks at the impact of increased digitization in our daily lives and also how technology enables us to re-imagine the future of work,” says Josh James, founder and CEO, Domo.

For additional information on the Data Never Sleeps 9.0 findings, visit here.