Powering $1 Trillion Black Friday
Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday; it forebodes a massive amount of food, but it also forebodes a massive amount of online shopping and the digital hunt for holiday deals.
Holiday sales this year could climb 5 percent and exceed $1.1 trillion. The e-commerce sector is expected to enjoy another bumper year, with digital sales expected to clock in at $144B-$148B, good for 14-18% growth compared to 11.2% last year.
Meanwhile, shoppers are not all that jazzed about lining up for hours in retail stores, jostling with other sweaty shoppers or throwing down with someone over the last doorbuster. Instead, shoppers are planning to spend 59% of their 2019 holiday budgets online vs. 36% in brick-and-mortar stores.
So, what will all this shopping translate into in terms of our internet usage? Specifically, how many barrels of oil will the planet need to burn to power the deluge of data moving between data centers and user devices on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday?
Growing Digital Storm
Source: Statista
The internet is growing so big and so fast that its scale is already awe-inspiring.
It’s estimated that there are 4.4 billion internet users across the globe with the figure expected to reach 4.7 billion in another two years. Yet, it’s the sheer amount of data that flows through the so-called cyber network that’s hard to wrap your head around.
To get an idea of how the holiday traffic compares to other days, we can look at holiday sales vs. normal day sales.
Statista comes to the rescue once again, with estimates that people spend $996,956 online every minute. That works out to $1.44 billion every single day.
While that sounds like a whole lot of cash to spend online over the course of just 24 hours, it still pales in comparison with what people spend on Black Friday and the holiday season in general.
Last year, shoppers spent $6.2B online on Black Friday (23.6% growth); $3.7B on Thanksgiving (28% growth) and a staggering $7.9B on Cyber Monday, the highest one-day tab of all time.
In other words, people spent 4.3x online on Black Friday as they do on normal days. If this year’s Black Friday sales grow at the midpoint of Deloitte’s estimates, then that figure is likely to grow to ~5x.
While that heightened spend is partly due to bigger shopping baskets during the holidays, it’s likely due in large part to more people shopping online as evidenced by rampant website failures as well as this claim by Bob Buffone, CTO at Yottaa, a web-optimization software company:
Black Friday, we will require a grand total of 2.2 million barrels of oil to power the internet on Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
That’s nearly a fifth of daily oil output by the United States, the world’s largest producer.
Again, it’s important to bear in mind that these figures are only rough estimates since online shopping does not consume as much data as watching videos and Netflix and also because a 5x increase in e-commerce traffic does not necessarily translate into a corresponding increase for other forms of traffic.