How much is Google's "And Counting" Worth?

One of the reasons we should prefer GMail, Google tells us, is because of "Lots of space."

Over 10242.795151 megabytes (and counting) of free storage.

Sure, 10GB is a lot of storage. The reason for the large amount is that Google hopes you will store all your email and associated documents so that it can comb through them and then present you with "relevant" ads -- ads from which it makes 90%+ of its revenues.

I wondered, however, about the amount after the decimal point, the "and counting" part. How quickly does it increase, and by how much.

The Amount of Increase

It's the last digit that clicks over, about 3-5 units with each increment. The last decimal place represents 1 byte, and so the storage amount increases by 3-5 bytes.

The Rate of Increase

I took a screen grab, and then started a 5-minute timer, following which I took a second screen grab. The storage space increased by 1,216 bytes in five minutes -- or 14.25KB/hour. In a year, the storage space should be up by 122MB, roughly.

It will take eight years before your GMail account grows by another gigabyte.

In summary, the changing number display is only socialogically interesting.