We all know the internet is a busy place, but how busy, exactly? Consider how many seconds it takes to read this paragraph. For every one of those seconds, more than 2,000 Skype calls will have been started, and more than 700 artful shots will have been posted to Instagram… and that's just for starters.

As Eric Brantner reports at Motherboard, the reach of the web continues to grow rapidly: there are now 3.4 billion people online (46.1 percent of the world's population), while internet-savvy young adults spend an average of 27 hours online every week.

Of course, having smartphones in our pockets makes tweeting and snapping and browsing much easier, too, because we no longer need to open up a laptop or sit down at a desk to connect.

So, with all that in mind, here are some more eye-opening statistics from the 1-second page at Internet Live Stats.

Every tick of the clock sees roughly 35,950 Gb of traffic changing hands, which equates to around 5,800 high-definition copies of the first Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (and that's definitely not a short film).

This massive pool of data is amassed because users across the globe typically perform 54,907 Google searches, 7,252 tweets, 125,406 YouTube video views and send 2,501,018 emails every second - numbers that are only growing larger as more people get online.

Internet Live Stats puts the total number of websites online today at a little over 1 billion, while close to 1.7 billion of us have now signed up for Facebook, and the site pulls together all this information from more than 250 sources and uses a customised algorithm to try and make an educated guess about what's happening online.

It won't surprise you to learn that all those figures are rising (and may well be out of date by the time you've read this article).

Some companies share their own stats of course: Netflix says its users watch 125 million hours of shows and movies each day, so every second that passes is another 1,447 or so hours' worth of Netflix content is streamed across the internet.

The Internet Live Stats are updated in real time so if you're stuck for something to do online, just let the enormity of the figures wash over you (perhaps you might feel a personal internet detox is in order afterwards).

The site is packed with facts too: did you know that in 1999, it took Google a month to index 50 million pages? Now, with the technology we have, it can do the same job in under a minute.