Ed Note: For some reason my brain is always asking crazy random questions. And for some reason I like to try and figure them out. For a long time I’d just do them on the back of an envelope, but figured why not share them with the world. 

What do you think? Have something you’d like me to sketch on the back of an envelope? Tweet it to me at @aten!

I was browsing Facebook the other day and lost a post. I knew I had seen it earlier but wanted to find it again. So I started scrolling. And scrolling. AND SCROLLING.

And I wondered: If Facebook was actually printed how much Facebook would people scroll each day? So I tried to figure it out.

1 Billion people use Facebook everyday [1].
The spend 20 minuntes on average [1].
So humanity is spending about 10 Billion minutes on Facebook a day [2].

I’d guess about 1/2 of that time is on the timeline (vs Reading stories or looking at pictures) [2] so approx 5 Billion minutes a day are spent on the timeline [2].

If people look at  each screen for 5 seconds [3] before flipping to the next screen we get 25 Billion screens of content a day [4].

The average phone has a screen height of 3.5” [3] (and I’m totally ignoring desktop here).

So people are scrolling something like 87.5 billion inches of virtual screens every day.

Which is roughly:
1.3M miles or 56 times around the earth every day [4].

[1] Actual Number
[2] Calculated from Actual Numbers
[3] Ed Estimate
[4] Calculation includes Estimates