There’s an oft-cited statistic in the world of technology professionals, from marketers to startup founders to data scientists: 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years.
This instantly-Tweetable snippet was referenced in Forbes in 2018[1], mentioned by MediaPost in 2016[2], and covered on Science Daily in 2013[3]. A casual observer could be forgiven for asking: How could that be true in three different years?
At Fractl, the data makes perfect sense to us: The global amount of digital information is growing exponentially over time.
This means that the “90 percent of all data…” statistic was true in 2013, 2016, and 2018, and it will continue to be true for the foreseeable future. As our culture continues to become more internet-integrated and mobile, we continue to produce massive amounts of data[4] year over year while also becoming more comfortable with understanding large quantities of information.
This is hugely important to anyone who creates content on the web: Stats about how much data we create are great, but the stories buried in that data are what really matter. In the opening manifesto[5] for FiveThirtyEight, one of the first sites on the web specifically devoted to data journalism, Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver wrote:
“Almost everything from our sporting events to our love lives now leaves behind a data trail.”
This type of data has always been of interest to marketers doing consumer research, but the rise of data journalism[6] shows us that there is both consumer demand and almost infinite potential for great storytelling rooted in numbers.
In this post, I’ll highlight four