AnythingCounter
Digital World Statistics
Live counters and real-time data on the internet, society, AI, and technology.
Selfies taken today
Roughly 2K selfies every second.
Full statistics & history →All statistics are sourced from official reports and peer-reviewed research. Methodology →
Screen & Scams
Selfies, streaming, cyberbullying and digital scams. How much screen time actually costs.
A selfie is a self-portrait taken with a smartphone camera, usually shared on social media. "Selfie" became Oxford's Wor…
Streaming is video on demand over the internet: Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Disney+, Twitch. In July 2022, streaming overt…
People are arrested every day for what they posted online. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report, covering 72 countr…
Cyberbullying is harassment via social media, messaging, games, or email. It can happen 24/7, reach unlimited audiences,…
Online fraud includes investment scams, phishing, identity theft, business email compromise, and romance scams. The FBI'…
Dating scams use fake romantic profiles to manipulate victims over weeks or months, then extract money. Scammers often p…
Romance scams are among the fastest-growing fraud categories. US FTC reported losses grew from $76 million (2016) to $1.…
Ad blocking is software that prevents ads from loading on web pages and in apps. It took off around 2009 with browser ex…
Content & Media
AI-generated images, deepfakes, fake news and the information environment we live in.
AI image generation creates synthetic images from text prompts using diffusion models. Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Mid…
TikTok launched globally in 2018 and became the fastest app to reach 1 billion downloads. By early 2026 it reaches ~1.9…
YouTube, founded in 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006, is the world's largest video platform. In 2026, around 500 hour…
AI-generated news means articles, summaries, and reports that are mostly or entirely written by large language models, w…
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot answer text and voice queries using large language models. ChatG…
An AI hallucination is a confident, plausible-sounding answer that's wrong or made up. The term comes from neuroscience:…
When AI outputs are wrong or fabricated, the damage is real. Companies using AI for research, legal work, finance, or cu…
AI saves time, but a chunk of that comes straight back as rework. Three studies from 2025 and 2026 found the same patter…
A deepfake is synthetic video, audio, or images where someone's likeness is convincingly faked using AI. The term mixes…
Fake reviews are ratings posted to mislead buyers. Businesses buy them to boost stars, or "review bomb" competitors. The…
False news spreads faster than true news. The MIT/Science study (2018) analysed 126,000 verified stories on Twitter (200…
The counter estimates how many of each day's new uploads fall into the same 'effectively unheard' reality Luminate docum…
About 4,600 new artists upload their first track to Spotify every day. That's one every 19 seconds. The platform has 8 m…
Attention & Time
Ads, social media, notification counts and other things competing for your attention every day.
The much-shared 'human attention span fell to 8 seconds — shorter than a goldfish' line comes from a 2015 Microsoft Cana…
People in developed economies see an estimated 4,000-10,000 ad messages per day: phones, billboards, packaging, TV, soci…
How much time do we spend on social media? GWI surveys users 16-64 in 54 countries. The average grew from 90 minutes/day…
Americans spend less time with friends than they used to. BLS time-use data: 60 minutes per day in 2003, collapsing to 2…
Society & Work
Automation, robots, jobs and online dating. How technology is changing how we live and work.
Meeting a spouse online went from odd to normal in under 20 years. Stanford's Rosenfeld (PNAS 2019) tracked how US coupl…
Automation creates jobs too. The WEF 2023 report projects 69 million new jobs from 2023-2027: AI specialists, data analy…
Automation is eating jobs faster now. Robotics, AI, and RPA all contribute. WEF 2023: 83 million jobs displaced globally…
Industrial robots are programmable machines for manufacturing, warehousing, logistics. The IFR tracks installations sinc…
Hard to separate robot jobs from general automation. MIT (Acemoglu & Restrepo 2020): each robot per 1,000 workers cuts e…
Digital distractions & road safety
The real-world cost of phones behind the wheel: crashes, deaths and distracted-driving data.
Phone use behind the wheel kills. WHO: 1.19 million road deaths globally per year. NHTSA: 3,000-3,500 US deaths per year…
Beyond deaths, distracted driving injures hundreds of thousands. NHTSA: 280,000-391,000 US injuries per year from distra…
NHTSA has required AV/ADAS crash reporting since June 2021. Incidents rose from 329 in 2021 to 1,384 in 2024, 5,202 tota…
Security & Privacy
Phishing attacks, cookie banners and the surveillance economy.
Phishing is a type of cyberattack where criminals send fraudulent electronic messages, most commonly emails, that impers…
GDPR forces cookie banners on every EU site visit. Legiscope (2023): 404 million EU users see ~1,020 banners per year, 5…
Environment & Energy
E-waste, data-centre energy and water, rare minerals and the physical cost of digital life.
E-waste is discarded electronics: phones, laptops, TVs, fridges. The world's fastest-growing waste stream. The UN's last…
E-waste is an urban mine. The 62 million tonnes discarded in 2022 held $62 billion in recoverable materials — and on the…
Chips, solar panels, and fibre optics all start with silicon from sand. Not beach sand, but ultra-pure quartz. USGS: 8-9…
Data centres used ~415 TWh of electricity globally in 2024 and roughly 485 TWh in 2025 — about 1.5-1.7% of total demand…
Data centers need huge amounts of water for cooling. Global estimate: 660 billion liters per year. Google used 29 billio…
Digital Life
Unread emails, phones being charged, new internet users. Numbers from ordinary digital life.
~376.4 billion emails per day in 2025 (Radicati 2023-2027), growing ~4% per year to 392.5 billion/day in 2026. Most neve…
7.21 billion smartphones in use globally (Statista 2025). Most people charge daily; 71% of US users charge once a day, 2…
About 805,000 people go online for the first time every day (294 million per year). DataReportal Digital 2026 (Oct 2025)…
Infrastructure
Internet traffic, active websites, hard drives, surveillance cameras and smart devices.
About 34 exabytes of data flow across the internet every day (AppLogic/Sandvine GIPR 2025) — roughly 8 billion DVDs wort…
Netcraft counts 1.35 billion websites across 287.5 million domains, but most are inactive or parked. The web adds 8-17 m…
HDDs fail at roughly 1-3% per year (Backblaze). With 3-4 billion drives in use worldwide, that's 30-120 million failures…
Over 1 billion surveillance cameras are installed globally; over 200 million ship each year. That's about 6 new cameras…
Smart speakers (Echo, Nest, HomePod) listen 24/7 for their wake word. About 200 million units ship each year, roughly 38…
Odd & Unexpected
UFO sightings, alien-life research and dying websites. The internet's stranger numbers.
Confirmed aliens on Earth: zero. The scientific consensus. NASA's 2023 UAP study found no evidence UAPs are extraterrest…
NUFORC has collected over 100,000 UFO/UAP reports since 1974. US reports run 3,900-5,500/year; globally, 10,000-25,000+…
Roughly 26% of domains expire without renewal each year. With 364 million domains registered globally, that's ~95 millio…
Why AnythingCounter's statistics are reliable
Published rates, local calendar
The rate behind each counter comes from our published sources and is the same for everyone. For running totals such as "so far today" or "this year", your browser uses your local date and time to count how much of the current day or year has elapsed, so two people in different time zones can see different numbers at the same instant (because "today" starts at different UTC times). If your device clock is wrong, the number will be off too. See our methodology page for detail.
Peer-reviewed sources only
Every rate is traced back to a primary source: a peer-reviewed journal article, an official government report, or a UN agency dataset. We do not cite Wikipedia, press releases, or marketing white papers. Source links and publication years are listed on each statistics page so you can check the original yourself.
Transparent rate calculation
Every counter is based on an annual total divided by the number of seconds in a year (31,557,600). Where a source reports a daily or monthly figure, we show the conversion. Where only regional data exists, we scale to global population and mark the number as an estimate.
Data updated as research advances
We update figures when a newer study or official report is published. Each datapoint shows the year it was sourced, so it is always clear how recent the underlying data is. Old numbers get replaced, not kept around quietly.