Global data created per year

We have somehow arranged the universe such that the amount of information humanity produces each year—every email, every cat video, every financial transaction that exists only as ones and zeros—moves in perfect tandem with the subscriber count of a man famous for giving away money to see what happens. The correlation is 0.964, which means if you knew nothing about YouTube in 2019 except MrBeast's subscriber numbers, you could predict global data creation within spitting distance. We are pattern-seeking creatures in a cosmos that occasionally indulges us.

The real explanation is almost certainly that both metrics are riding the same rising tide of global internet adoption and smartphone proliferation. Between 2016 and 2023, the world added roughly 2 billion internet users—each one a tiny factory producing data through every scroll, stream, and selfie. MrBeast's rise happened to coincide exactly with this explosion, the same way a surfer's height seems to correlate with the wave's height if you only measure when he's actually surfing. Both trends also benefited from improved broadband infrastructure, cheaper devices, and that peculiar moment when video became the internet's preferred language. By 2023, we were creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day—enough to fill roughly 250 million DVDs if anyone still knew what those were.

So we've learned that two entirely unrelated phenomena can move in lockstep if they're both passengers on the same historical current, which is either reassuring or deeply unsettling depending on your mood. This is how spurious correlations are born: not from malice, but from the fact that almost everything interesting is currently accelerating. The universe didn't make MrBeast's subscribers create data. The internet did.