How big is the internet?

Videos of a talking cat? Pictures of a Japanese taiko drum kit? Think of anything, however weird, and chances are you can find it online. But how much information is actually on the internet as a whole?

Bytes, kilobytes and megabytes

The internet consists of lots of pieces of digital information called ‘bytes’. A byte is just a tiny block of information. A single picture (of a Japanese drum kit, for example) consists of around 1,000 bytes or 1 kilobyte.

A single web page with text and a picture – like the cool page you are reading right now – consists of about 2 million bytes or 2 megabytes. A cat video consists of even more information: about 5 megabytes.

The internet is packed with pages that are full of photos and videos. The website WorldWideWebSize.com recently estimated that there were nearly 4 billion pages online (November 2023). All together, they consist of billions of bytes.

So how big is the whole internet? The answer is: very, very big. According to website Statista, the entire internet in 2023 consisted of up to 120 zettabytes of information. A zettabyte is 1 byte followed by 21 zeros! So that’s 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of cat videos, drum kits and answers to fun questions!

Answered by Melanie Metz