Content Omniverse Fact Sheet

Omniverse means relating to the universe, and more specifically, Merriam-Webster defines it as “a universe that is spatiotemporally four-dimensional.” In case you don’t use spatiotemporal in everyday conversation, it means having both spatial and temporal qualities … so it’s pretty huge.

In relation to content, the internet is an infinite abyss of video, social sharing, images, and copy content – the content omniverse. Executives and practitioners need to know not only the term  but key statistics in this content omniverse fact sheet. Why? Because this vast vortex of content is growing bigger and bigger by the second. As of April 2022, there were more than five billion internet users worldwide, which is 63.5 percent of the global population, according to DataReportal.

Americans spend about 8 hours online every day. This does not include time spent on passive activities, such as streaming music or video in the background while doing other tasks. — HighSpeedInternet.com

3.25 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month. — Fortunelords

The content omniverse is ever-expanding, growing in mind numbing amounts. Often when people think of content, they might imagine written words, text and images, especially those promoted on Facebook, but today, video is all the rage. On YouTube alone, 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute, and almost 5 billion videos are viewed daily. Mobile traffic on YouTube has also tripled since 2011.

When Google acquired YouTube back in 2006, the price tag was $1.65 billion, and that was less than two years from when the site was originally launched. In some more eye-opening statistics (pun intended), more video content is uploaded to YouTube in just one month than the three major U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) have created in more than 60 years of broadcasting. Now, that’s an awful lot of screentime.

And, let’s not forget about the podcasting boom. Seventy-five percent of Americans age 12+ (approximately 212 million people) are now familiar with podcasting, up from 70% in 2019. And, 37% (104 million) listen monthly, up from 32% in 2019, according to Edison Research. 

According to eMarketer, in 2013 social networking reached nearly one in four around the world. Now, well over one-third of the world’s population is using social media every month. — We Are Social

Who is devouring all this content? YouTube is one thing, but what about social media? With almost 2.8 billion people around the world using social media, that is where a majority portion of content hungry consumers thrive. A quick breakdown shows the following:

Global Activeness on Social Media

• Just over one billion users in Asia
• Around 280 million users in Latin America
• Almost 250 million users in Africa and the Middle East
• Over 200 million users in Western Europe
• Over 200 million users in Russia and Eastern Europe
• Just under 200 million in the United States and Canada

When you combine social media with YouTube, 500 years of video are watched on Facebook daily and Twitter shares 700 videos every minute. Over 100 million people take some sort of social action (like, comment, or share) on YouTube videos every week.

The image content universe contains 122 million users uploading content on Flickr, 500 million active monthly Instagram users, and 1.79 billion active Facebook users. – Social Pilot

While YouTube rules the video universe online, Facebook friends are posting 350 million new photos daily and sharing them with friends and family. Over on Flickr, their 122 million users are sharing 1 million photos each day. When Instagram exploded onto the marketplace, Facebook gobbled up this start-up in 2012, with 14 million users snapping 60 million photos per second.

Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting. ­– Bill Gates, Jan. 3, 1996 in an article titled Content is King.

Google reports there are over 60 trillion individual web pages available online that the search engine giant is crawling and indexing through constantly. And according to World Wide Web Size, the indexed web contains at least 4.6 billion pages. For bloggers, WordPress users produce about 84.3 million new posts and 41.8 million new comments each month. When it comes to consuming news-related content, 123 million Americans read their news online.

Bill Gates’ famous words still ring true almost two decades later as content continues to reign supreme online. Whether your content is in the form of video, social sharing, images, or copy, this is the reason content marketing strategies are so successful around the world.