Delano Herald Journal

Serving the communities of Delano, Loretto, Montrose, MN, and the surrounding area

Mark Ollig Column – 08/10/18



A recent report on US internet usage revealed 3.7 million queries are performed every minute using the Google search engine.

This breaks down to nearly 61,667 search queries per second – I know this because yours truly used a Google calculator to do the math part.

For most of us, the content of our inbox of email messages has increased to the point of becoming overwhelming; despite our best efforts to filter out the spam.

It’s not our fault. In fact, the number of emails being sent has gone up and through the roof of the internet.

For this year alone, it has been estimated over 187 million emails will be sent every minute.

Think of it. More than 8.2 trillion emails are generated each month, which means an estimated 98.4 trillion for the year.

These numbers are just mind-boggling.

It is challenging trying to keep our email inboxes clean of unwanted mail. Filtering tools help somewhat, but the spam emails will continue to be something we will just have to put up with.

Instead of entirely relying on email, I use an alternate system: my smartphone’s instant messaging.

I’ve actually become less dependent upon email by instead using my smartphone’s text messaging feature for most correspondences with family and friends.

I also use text messaging to confirm doctor appointments, receive notices for my pharmacy prescription pickups, banking information notifications, package deliveries, and as an alert for when my car is scheduled for maintenance.

Recent numbers show the number of text messages currently being sent over smart devices averages 18 million per minute.

People are spending more money this year conducting their business and shopping using online internet retailers, and traditional brick-and-mortar stores with a website. So far this year, the average amount spent is nearly $863,000 every minute. In 2017, the average was $751,000.

It’s no surprise; video content streamed over the internet is increasingly being watched by us.

The number of videos being viewed every minute using YouTube is now at 4.3 million. In 2016, it was 2.8 million videos per minute.

In 2017, 70,000 hours of video were being watched every minute on Netflix. This year, the number has dramatically increased to 266,000 hours per minute.

One daily morning routine for many of us is to log into Facebook.

The latest statistics show 973,000 Facebook logins are occurring each minute.

The number of software applications (apps) being downloaded to smartphones and smart devices every minute has substantially increased.

In 2016, the number of apps downloaded averaged 51,000 per minute.

Today, 375,000 individual app downloads happen every minute.

To put this into better perspective, I collected the estimated monthly statistics for 2018:

Facebook logins: 42.6 billion;

Google searches: 162.1 billion;

Emails sent: 8.2 trillion;

Internet shopping: $37.8 billion.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), an independent international organization, is one source I used for today’s numbers.

Several statistical numbers were provided to the WEF by Visual Capitalist, an emerging trends digital content provider.

Be sure to visit my Bits & Bytes weblog at bitscolumn.blogspot.com.

Here is the final number I will leave you with; 120,473. This is the total number of views my weblog has received since May 2010.

Have a great week.








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