Every year, at some point, a statistic comes out made specifically to attract our attention: it tells what happens on the Internet in a minute. And every time he photographs the impressive growth of our digital activities which for some years have become increasingly social: posts, tweets, reels, stories, chats. More and more. But in the 2021 report there is not only the story – in numbers – of what we do online but also of what we are becoming. Let’s start with a fact, the most important. An average of 167 million videos on TikTok are viewed on the Internet in one minute. Every minutes. 167 million. You know how it works with numbers: they are not big or small at all but in relation to other numbers, to the phenomenon we are talking about. For example, if someone told you that there are a billion bees in the world, you would have to reply: so few?
The same goes for videos viewed on TikTok in one minute. Is that a lot or a few 167 million per minute? To answer, I took the opposite path: I took the other social networks and saw how many TikTok videos correspond to. Example: each tweet corresponds to 290 videos seen on TikTok, each Google search to 29 videos, each photo shared on Instagram to 2500 videos, each hour of streaming on Netflix to 300 videos, each message sent on Whatsapp to 4 videos. Only the number of emails sent (300 billion per day, approximately) is comparable to the number of videos we see on TikTok.
Because it’s interesting? Because TikTok is becoming the representation of the world and also our way of informing and communicating. Short videos, sometimes funny but not always, personal, uncoated, capable of telling a story in a minute. This is a clear change from centuries of prevalence of the written word, and then of long audio and video (radio and television). Is it good or bad? I don’t know, but I’m sure that if Homer were reborn today instead of writing the Iliad, Achilles’ wrath would be told on TikTok.
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