Every day millions of people are sharing images, movies and simple status updates with their peers either publicly or privately over the Internet. The infographic below succinctly illustrates something we rarely get to see in a single visual snapshot – a broad view of just how much content is being published to specific networks every day, and the numbers are astounding.

As you can see, Facebook alone handles 1.5 billion status updates, notes, blog posts, photo comments and videos as shared by the social network’s 500 million active users every day. Twitter, the distant runner-up, only handles 140 million daily tweets. That’s a vast improvement from its 50 million daily tweets at this time last year. It’s important to note that these graphs represent statistics as of March 2011 – today Facebook has over 600 million users and Twitter now handles 155 million tweets per day, offering a rate of growth that changes almost as fast as people can graph it.

YouTube users upload 35 hours of video to its servers every minute, amounting to 2 million uploads a day. The photo-sharing site Flickr receives 5 million uploaded images daily – about 60 pictures a second.

Out of the about 150 million blogs on the Internet, 1.6 million posts are generated daily – 35 percent of which are contributed by professional bloggers. Tumblr handles 10 million posts every day, but that represents an increase of 8 million daily posts compared to March 2010. There are only approximately 60,000 websites added to the Internet every day, but – to be fair – these are generally more complex than a simple tweet or status update.

Overall, Facebook dwarfs the competition by a long shot, which is no surprise given how user-friendly and socially-driven the website is. I had to go outside just to clear my head after looking at the charts you see below. You may want to sit down before you take a peek. You’ve been warned.

[h/t @eric_andersen]