Way back in 2007 we posted a very excited blog about Cisco’s annual report and its projections for the future of internet traffic. By 2012, we reported, internet traffic was set to reach half a zettabyte. That’s a huge amount. As we explained three years ago:

“What is a Zettabyte? Let’s start with the more commonly known gigabyte and work from there.

Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes

Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes

Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes

Exabyte = 1000 Petabytes

Zettabyte = 1000 Exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes”

Fastforward to now, 2010. According to the latest figures available, the “digital universe” is currently approx 0.8 zettabytes; around 300 exabytes larger than we estimated it would be by 2012. It’s forecast to exceed the zettabyte at some point this year.

While we may have got the figures wrong – and by quite a margin – we were right on the causes behind the increase in information on the internet. In our 2007 blog we pointed out the huge impact of “Web 2.0”. Web users have embraced social networking. The increasing prevalence of rich-media content being created and shared by both individual users and organisations has also had a massive impact. And that’s not to mention the mobile web explosion…

So, yes, we weren’t exactly spot-on with our estimates. But in this instance we’re more than happy to be proven wrong. We’re excited about the implications that the web expansion has for the creative and analytical aspects of our industry, and also excited on a purely geeky level; a zettabyte is an insane amount of data.