Annual Global Web Traffic to Exceed 1 Zettabyte This Year

The internet is a big place, and it’s growing at an exponential rate every year. With websites now averaging 2.3MB, and their size is “increasing inexorably” says Ronan Cremi, CTO of DeviceAtlas, who released a study on webpages earlier this year. That means that websites are now on average at least the same size as the original Doom game was!

We’ve made it! Doom-sized web pages are now merely average. https://t.co/U6oXQhCsms pic.twitter.com/PNrq3jdSiF

— ronan cremin (@xbs) April 19, 2016

The number of websites has increased by over 1000% over the last 10 years, with well over 1 billion websites making up the internet today. Bigger pages, and a heck of a lot more of them = virtually incomprehensible amounts of data. To collect data that shows us the true scale is almost impossible when you consider the video data of YouTube, Netflix, and more, all the music streaming services, the porn, plenty of that out there (apparently), and everything else, including tens of thousands of pages that make up eTeknix. The latest Visual Networking Index Report from Cisco, which gives us a forecast of global internet traffic, reports that global web traffic is set to exceed a zettabyte (ZB) this year.

If you’re unsure what a zettabyte is, it’s 1,000 exabytes, and a exabyte is one billion gigabytes… that’s a lot of cat memes, so much so that it would take a staggering 20 billion Blu-Ray discs to store all the information, and remember, that number is growing rapidly. Cisco estimates that by 2020, the figure will be an equally staggering 2.3zb, with a predicted 4.1 billion online users at that time.

This growth means a lot of strain on existing internet services, but companies like Google and WordPress are already looking at ways of making the internet more efficient, faster, and more capable. Let’s just hope all the other big names out there do their part to do the same.