Original video created by Captain Gizmo (We sped it up 10X for faster viewing).
According to Captain Gizmo:
In this data visualization video I look at the most popular websites based on monthly visits, the industry standard when comparing websites. It does not take into account page views nor unique visitors. Some of the data includes approximate numbers as the data available skipped years.
I also include screenshots of certain sites from the list as they looked during that particular year. The websites in the thumbnails include:
- 1993 Apple: First Apple website
- 1994 Amazon: Featured book search and shopping cart
- 1995 WebCrawler: Most popular search engine in the mid 90s
- 1996 Excite: Purchased WebCrawler after it’s IPO that year
- 1997 BBC: Official launch followed by rebranding to BBCi
- 1998 Google: Official launch
- 1999 AOL: AOL Desktop kept users on AOL properties
- 2000 Apple: Steve Jobs regains leadership as CEO
- 2001 eBay: Had largest userbase of any e-commerce site
- 2002 Walmart: First version of the site had launched a year earlier
- 2003 MSN: MSN Explorer displaying MSN page
- 2004 Yahoo: Search and landing page
- 2005 MySpace: Acquired by News Corp. in July for $580M
- 2006 MySpace: Allowed custom backgrounds and colors
- 2007 YouTube: Used as much bandwidth as entire internet in 2000
- 2008 Facebook: Introduced new design plus messenger
- 2009 Ask: Jeeves returns to the site
- 2010 Baidu: Becomes top search engine in China
- 2011 Amazon: Became the largest source of consumer reviews
- 2012 Amazon: Redesign and simplifying shopping experience
- 2013 MySpace: The horizontal redesign failed to captivate users
- 2014 Instagram: Started monetizing with video ads
- 2015 VK: Top social media site in Russia
- 2016 Twitter: The “verified” blue check-mark was unveiled
- 2017 Wikipedia
- 2018 Walmart: Acquired Indian company Flipkart in August
- 2019-2020 Facebook: Redesign plus a new “care” reaction emoj
Visual Capitalist crunched the numbers and found the date ranges for the top sites.
| Date Range | Top Ranking Website | Highest Number of Monthly Visits |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 1993 – Jun 2000 | AOL | 405,000,000 |
| Jul 2000 – May 2006 | Yahoo | 5,500,000,000 |
| Jun 2006 – Jul 2008 | 8,300,000,000 | |
| Aug 2008 – Jun 2010 | Yahoo | 11,600,000,000 |
| Jul 2010 – current | 81,000,000,000 |
Even as far back as 1993 AOL was getting over 20 million monthly visits. Which was equivalent to just over 7.5% of the US population in 193 of 260 million.
Fast forward to 2020, and Google gets 81 billion monthly visits or the equivalent of around 10 visits a month from every person in the whole world.
Which of these top websites was your favourite:
Most Popular Pages:
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