A short video by the media agency DBA Worldwide gathered platform statistics into a single figure: what happens across social media in the course of one day. It reached this page by way of the BBC College of Journalism, which had picked it up first.
The format was a fixture of 2010. Counters from the major platforms were stacked up and set to music, and the result circulated through newsrooms as an argument about scale — that the volume of public conversation being produced daily had become a reporting problem as well as an audience one. Figures of that kind age by the week, and the specific numbers in the video were out of date within a year of it being made. What made them worth watching at the time was the order of magnitude rather than any individual count.