We’ve been discussing the monster that is big data a lot lately (us and the rest of the IT world). To many people, the concept seems irrelevant and almost mythical. While the potential it offers businesses is huge, today we’re going to focus on why it exists in the first place.

If you’re reading this, you have helped create big data. To illustrate this idea, DOMO, a business intelligence platform, created an infographic showcasing how much data is created per minute. All of the numbers are impressive, but the most astounding stats include: 571 new websites are created; consumers spend $272,070; Google receives over 2,000,000 search queries and 204,166,667 emails are sent. Remember, this is per minute. That’s a lot of data!