The Evolution Of Online Content Consumption [Infographic]

As new services on the Internet allow us to share more content and faster, we’re also increasing the amount of content we consume. The fact is, when comparing our content consumption ten years ago with our content consumption today, you would almost think we’re several millenniums apart. In fact, our content consumption is so high that we’re on the brink of over populating the Internet with content. Well, everything is relative I guess.

Just trying to imagine that the Internet had half as many users just five years ago should be mind boggling enough. But when we look at our content consumption throughout the years, we’re faced with a paradox that is quite hard to understand. By 2003, it had taken us all of our entire history to fill 5 billion gigabytes of storage. Today we reach that amount of content in 2 days! And as if that wasn’t enough, next year we’ll curate 5 billion gigabytes in 10 minutes. Where is it all going to stop?

Of course, all the photo sharing services are pulling their weight in to make this number increasingly larger. But that is not the only area where content consumption is increasing massively. Video and music consumption are increasing as much as everything else. For music labels, this should be a good sign. They have always been whining about their revenues going down due to all the piracy in the world. That might be the case, but every other industry has been able to adapt so why don’t they? It’s another paradox that I have never really understood.

In order to grasp our increase in content consumption, I was presented an inforgraphic by Torch (design by NowSourcing) which allows us to see our insane content consumption in a more visual presentation. As we can see, YouTube has become our prime outlet for video content, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. There are even awards being handed out for best online artists at the Grammy Awards these days. That should say something about the impact that some of these social networking services have on all of our lives. Will we be able to keep up? That is a question only the future can answer.