95 Things People Learned Online And Immediately Had To Share

Well, we know for sure that there’s no shortage of interesting things the internet can fit. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to collecting them, with millions of followers posting and browsing all the time.

And that’s just a speck of dust compared to everything else out there. So just how big is the internet? How much stuff does it actually hold? And could it really be infinite? Let’s find out.

To understand the size of the internet, you first need to know how we measure it. Everything online is made up of tiny blocks of digital information called bytes. A thousand bytes make a kilobyte, a thousand kilobytes make a megabyte, and a thousand megabytes make a gigabyte.

A tiny image like a thumbnail takes up about 10 kilobytes. A web page with some text and photos sits at around 2 megabytes. And a funny cat video, for example, is roughly 25 megabytes. Now imagine how much of that adds up across the entire internet.

The website WorldWideWebSize.com estimated that there were nearly 4 billion pages online as of 2025. All of those pages, packed with photos and videos and text, add up to a staggering amount of data.

According to Health IT, the total amount of data on the internet hit 64 zettabytes back in 2020. A zettabyte is about a trillion gigabytes. And by 2025, that number had already jumped to 181 zettabytes worldwide.

That’s genuinely hard to picture, so here’s a comparison that might help. If you stored just 175 zettabytes on DVDs, the stack would be tall enough to circle the Earth 222 times. And if you tried to download all of it at the average internet connection speed, it would take you about 1.8 billion years.

For context, that’s roughly how long ago the first complex cells appeared on Earth. So you’d basically need to start your download before multicellular life even existed.

So could the internet just keep growing forever? Technically, there’s no fixed upper limit to how much data it can hold. It keeps expanding as new servers and storage devices come online. 

But physically, it can’t truly be infinite. At the end of the day, the internet runs on real hardware. Servers, cables, data centers. All of that takes up space and energy in the real world. While the internet feels limitless, it’s actually a massive network of very finite machines working together.

But most of the internet is not made up of the stuff we casually see every day. The memes you scroll past, the Bored Panda articles you read, and the Google search results you click all belong to what’s called the Surface Web. 

That’s the part anyone can access with a regular browser like Chrome or Firefox. It’s public and easy to reach, but it makes up only a tiny fraction of the internet as a whole.

Below the surface sits the Deep Web, which is the portion that standard search engines can’t index.

This isn’t as shady as it sounds. Most of it is just data stored behind logins and permissions, like your online banking portal or your social media account. The content there updates constantly and looks different depending on who’s viewing it. 

Then there’s the Dark Web, a smaller subset that requires specialized software to access. It’s gotten a reputation for illegal activity, but it also hosts legitimate services and private communication tools.

The bottom line is that the internet is so massive it almost defies comprehension. What we interact with every day barely scratches the surface, literally. And it’s still growing at a pace that would’ve sounded like science fiction just a couple of decades ago. 

So the next time you stumble on something fascinating online, just remember there are billions of pages out there you haven’t even come close to seeing yet. Happy scrolling.