← Research · Part 1 of 10

The same problem physics and genomics have.

Astronomy, climate science and genome research all became quantitative disciplines for one reason: the data outgrew what a person could hold in their head. Consumer behavior crossed that line about a decade ago, and almost nobody has treated it that way since.

Data created worldwide each year, in zettabytes20102201515.5202064202518120272842028394MeasuredForecastA 197-fold increase in 18 years
Global data creation went from 2 zettabytes a year to 181 in fifteen years, and is forecast to more than double again by 2028.
Source: IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, reported via Statista, “Volume of data created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide, 2010–2029,” November 2025. Figures for 2027 and 2028 are IDC forecasts, not measurements.
Data created worldwide each year,in zettabytes20102201515.5202064202518120272842028394MeasuredForecastA 197-fold increase in 18 years
Global data creation went from 2 zettabytes a year to 181 in fifteen years, and is forecast to more than double again by 2028.
Source: IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, reported via Statista, “Volume of data created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide, 2010–2029,” November 2025. Figures for 2027 and 2028 are IDC forecasts, not measurements.
Searches per year, as disclosed by the platforms themselvesGoogle, 20162 trillionGoogle, 20255 trillionAmazon, 202648 billionGoogle’s two official disclosures sit nine years apart. Amazon’s figure is from its ownBrand Analytics search-term census, which I pull quarterly through a seller account.
Google disclosed 2 trillion searches a year in 2016 and more than 5 trillion in 2025 — its only two official figures, nine years apart.
Sources: Google, official disclosure, 2016. Google, official disclosure, March 2025 — its first update to the figure in nine years. Amazon figure derived from the Amazon Brand Analytics search-term census, Q2 2026, pulled through a Seller Central account (938,986 ranked terms; approximately 4 billion searches per month).
Annual data volume, on a logarithmic scale — each step is 1,000 times the lastOne sequenced human genome~200 gigabytesNOAA climate and weather archive~40 petabytesCERN, the Large Hadron Collider~90 petabytesSquare Kilometre Array, complete~700 petabytesEverything created on Earth181 zettabytesThe world produces roughly two million times the Large Hadron Collider’s annual output,every year. Most of it is behavioral, and almost none of it is examined.
Every field on this chart built a discipline, a method and a profession around its data. Marketing is the one that did not.
Sources: human genome, approximate raw sequence size per genome, National Human Genome Research Institute. NOAA, National Centers for Environmental Information archive holdings. CERN, annual data recorded by the Large Hadron Collider experiments. Square Kilometre Array Observatory, projected annual archive volume at full operation. Global figure: IDC Global DataSphere via Statista, 2025. Bars are logarithmic; magnitudes are approximate and drawn to order, not to exact value.

One zettabyte, written out

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

A one followed by twenty-one zeros. The world now creates 181 of these every year.

4 KBApollo 11 guidance computer
working memory (RAM), 1969
72 KBApollo 11 guidance computer
program storage, woven by hand
69.63 KBVoyager 1 and 2
total onboard memory, 1977
128 KBThe first Macintosh
January 1984

Put together, those four machines hold about 274 kilobytes — roughly a quarter of a megabyte. They landed people on the Moon, left the solar system, and started personal computing. The world now produces more data every second than all four could have stored in several trillion lifetimes.

Sources: Apollo Guidance Computer, 2,048 words of erasable core memory and 36,864 words of core rope memory — approximately 4 KB RAM and 72 KB ROM (MIT Instrumentation Laboratory; NASA). Voyager 1 and 2 combined onboard memory, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Macintosh 128K, 128 KB RAM, Apple Computer, January 1984. Global data figure: IDC Global DataSphere via Statista, 2025.

The instruments exist

Analytics platforms, search consoles, crawl tools, marketplace search censuses. The measurement problem is not a lack of instruments.

The method mostly does not

Three in four marketers never measure return using their own data. In physics that would be an unpublished experiment.

That gap is the practice

Not better tools. A written instrument, a baseline recorded before anything changes, and a log of what else moved.

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