Evidence Suggests At Least 2 Trillion Pictures Are Being Taken Annually (and Rising)

From PMANewsline.com:

The opportunity in the photo industry continues to grow, as more and more pictures are taken. Blogger Benedict Evans reports, in 1999, the peak of the film-camera industry, consumers took around 80 billion photos, according to Kodak. We’re taking far more now, but how many more? At least 2 trillion, maybe double that, maybe more.

According to Evans, no-one can know this exactly, but there are some points of triangulation:

• Facebook said in May 2015 that two billion photos are shared on its systems every day, by 1.4bn users - a 730bn/year run-rate.
• This does not include WhatsApp, which in April 2014 it said it was seeing 700m photos a day from 500m users (255bn a year) - it seems pretty likely that that number has risen since.
• Snapchat gave a number of 700m a day, back in May 2014 - again, that will have risen (a lot) since.

Evans said, just rounding WhatsApp and Snapchat up to 1 billion a day to account for growth in the last year and presuming no growth at Facebook this year gets us to a figure of 1.5 trillion photos shared this year. Growth in usage in the year across these could easily take that to over 2 trillion. That presumes no duplication between these three networks, which is not certain but might not be enormous.

For more information, check out PMANewsline.com or the original post on Ben Evans Blog.

Note: To put that number into perspective, if two trillion one-dollar bills were place on top of each other, the stack would be 135,732 miles tall, or a little over halfway to the moon. [Sean]