New figures from the UK’s cartridge retailer Cartridgesave.co.uk have revealed what would happen if all Facebook status updates were to be printed. In order to find out, www.Cartridgesave.co.uk conducted a study of 2,102 Facebook users across the UK, in a bid to discover how often, on average, Facebook statuses were updated.
According to the Cartridgesave.co.uk study, the majority of respondents, 62%, updated their Facebook status ‘once a day’, on average. The respondents were asked to specify, on average, how long each Facebook status was; to which more than half, 56%, said ‘two lines’.
According to Facebook, there are at least 800 million active users of the social network across the World. If all of these users were to update their status once a day for a whole year, this would equate to 292 billion updates.
If each status update, on average, is two lines long, then over the course of one year this would accumulate to 584 billion lines. As the average sheet of A4 paper holds 51 lines of size 11 Arial font (margins considered) you would need 11.5 billion ( 11,450,980,392) sheets of paper to print every status update for one year; the same amount of paper used for more than half a million (520,499) Oxford English Dictionaries.
The respondents to the study were asked to estimate how much time they spent reading Facebook on a daily basis, to which the average, when all answers were taken into account, was ’32 minutes’. If it takes approximately 3 minutes to read one sheet of A4 paper, Facebookers would need 573 million hours (572,549,020 hours) to read every status update made in one year; the same amount of time it would take to fly around the World 8.5 million (8,545,507) times.
If these updates were printed in black and white, using an average HP Inkjet printer, the ink would cost more than £147 million (£147,226,890). This would equate to the same cost of building two London Eyes.
(Infographic Credit: cartridgesave.co.uk)
